Someone Else’s House 

By EMILY LEITHAUSER

When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,

body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;

shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned 

dominion all around. And when 
you find the right 

news source, you will weep, or have sex, 
or forget; you will give

money and cry in earnest.
We’ve wanted to save

each other for so many years
that we’ve forgotten 

how. In the afternoon 
the cathedral was almost 

cold. But when he explained 
that he, all that time, 

had been with someone else, 
I felt no cold, 

no global catastrophes,
just me: flawed

and echoing. And when
I breathed, I saw

my mistakes, bright and clean 
as glass in the windows 

of someone else’s house.

 

 

[Purchase Issue 29 here.]

Emily Leithauser’s poetry and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Literary Matters, and Literary Imagination, among other publications. Her book is The Borrowed World. She teaches English and creative writing at Morehouse College. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Someone Else’s House 

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