no one warns the girl her body is a haunted
house, the blood a tenant. it returns in floods
as she takes a scalpel to the dollhouse, slicing
through the wallpapered silence, the tiny chairs
overturned like accidented bugs. there’s a sentimentality
to this collapse, like untying a green ribbon from
your throat & finding nothing underneath but
a repetition of what the body couldn’t purge,
a memory of the indigestible—setting fire
to your childhood drawings, watching the faces
melt, unnamed. it wants her tender first, softened
by sleeplessness, peeled pink like a lamb’s
tongue left in the sink. there’s a sugar ghost
bleeding down the hallway where mother
used to hum through her teeth, and beneath
the linoleum, something soft and ancestral twitches—
a ferret, a fetus, a string of wet pearls; it knows
the temperature of her breath the day she stopped asking
to be loved, how the air buzzes, wasp-thick and sour.
the house keeps her like the skin keeps the scar,
anger braided into her like a second spine,
architectural. what is mold if not the memory
of a house leaking? it spreads where forgetting failed.
she knows the shape of every silence here, to hollow
herself into a warning, the cramp like
a small animal gnawing behind the
hipbone, the clot like a shriveled eye,
watching. a body is but a clock buried
in the backyard; it paces in thresholds
with pieces of time that no longer know
where they belong, something moving long after
the body stops. a hallway that repeats like a fever.
(even love, if left unburied, begins to stink.
it congeals in corners, slips the rugs,
gathers in teacups nobody drinks from
anymore.) they will tell her the haunting
is a repetition of care, and that is the story of
every girl who lived in her body long
enough to see it become somebody else’s.

Jen Rubio Florián is a Dominican violinist and writer based in Florida. Her Spanish fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Malvestida, Volcánicas, Marie Claire Brasil, and other publications.