The Apple Falls: A Comic Strip in 5 Panels

1.
Home is written on every wall

with the carcasses of killed insects,

an un-paintable promise to which
I hold the only key.

 

In peace, the doorway widens

and the songs of ice cream,

tugging from without, find me

sighing at the boarded window.

 

2.
They wake me like a habit. My privates

swell and brush the Holy Ghost,
drag me to the threshold as my heart

returns to pulse behind my eyes.

 

The couch becomes a bunk-bed soaked

in tears and accidental semen,
the shelves grow taller, and my father

is a walking hymn behind me.

 

3.
I peel my eyes for little angels

among the bones piled on the porch,

but their notes are scattered, bobbing

drunkenly through the frame.

 

Their buzzing trips me
on the front steps, and I fall before
a mustached corpse. The grass is wet

and full of flies discarding tiny halos.

 

4.
They swarm the lamps and hallways
as the house turns to a memory of sculpture,

and I gather stray nails, prepared
to kill again—

 

5.
thinking of my father, humming.

 

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Andrew Collard lives in Madison Heights, MI. His poems appear in journals including A Minor, Juked, and Word Riot, among others. He attends Oakland University and co-edits SiDEKiCK LIT.