POETRY |
It is the kitchen with cooking smells - Weebly.com
You are gone
but the house remains. It is not yours anymore yet it is forever yours. Your breath contained in the narrow hallway, the imprint of your fingers on the doorknobs. A building is more than a building. It is a pulsating collection of stored laughter, regretted shouts and room-filled exhilaration. It is the now concave centers of the wooden stairs from generations of climbing feet. It is the bedroom that used to be a den. It is the den that used to be a bedroom. It is the living room with the once coveted working fireplace that now sits idle so as not to pollute the air with smoke from glowing flames. It is the kitchen with cooking smells permeating the walls, the bathroom with fixtures that were once modern and now are quaint or, insultingly, outdated. The stuck window that maybe is worth having fixed, the creaking floorboard that scared the puppy, the stain on the otherwise perfect dining room floor from before he learned to wait to go outside. A house is more than us. It is the accumulation of all the living within its walls, the history of everyone there combined, leading us to say, without knowing why, “This house has character.” Vertical Divider
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Since age six, Vivian Imperiale has been writing poetry to identify and process her emotions about the world around her. She soon learned that her poems could be meaningful to others. A friend touched her with these words, "You gave me words for an emotion I didn't even know I needed to express."
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Vistas & Byways Review is the semiannual journal of fiction, nonfiction and poetry by members of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI) at San Francisco State University.
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Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at San Francisco State University (OLLI at SF State) provides communal and material support to theVistas & Byways volunteer staff.
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