A general house is like a general store, a place to go when you’re feeling empty, where objects, once known, assuage you with their familiarity and corners. Bright pink bandanas are folded into perfect rectangles. In a box you find your daughter’s kindergarten pictures of flowers, crinkled but intact, red tempera paint extending beyond black outlined petals. There’s also long gloves from her Descendants’ Halloween costume wrapped in thick plastic. A pad of graph paper from once-upon-a-time trigonometry class. Your mom’s frilly hand fan from Savannah, Georgia. Beaded necklaces from New Orleans, where your father was pickpocketed and where you and your ex went to a strip club for the first time. Outstretched sweaters and a photo of your father’s first car, the baby-blue Cadillac, parked in front of Gristedes supermarket, where he worked as an accountant. Can you account for the stack of khaki clipboards, black socks and unworn underwear, postcards of crows, seals, and mountain climbers? When you tie up loose edges, you inhale dust and desire. A collapsed shopping cart hangs on a peg in the foyer, ready to collect items that can’t bring you back.

Publisher’s Note:

*General Haus (oil on canvas, 2023) by visual artist Lizzie Zelter (born 1996, New York, NY) may be viewed in her online gallery. (For an enlarged view of the painting, click on Year 2023 in her website’s “Work by” menu, and then scroll down to the fifth image.)

Susan Michele Coronel

lives in New York City. Her first full-length collection, In the Needle, A Woman (Finishing Line Press, 2025), won the 2024 Donna Wolf Palacio Poetry Prize. Versions of her book were named finalists for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize (2021), the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award (2023), the C&R Press Poetry Award (2023), and the Louise Bogan Award (2024).

A two-time Pushcart nominee, she has poems published in numerous journals including The Ekphrastic Review, Mom Egg Review (MER), ONE ART, Redivider, Spillway (#29), and Tab Journal among others. In 2023, she won the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Award.

Author’s website: https://www.susanmichelecoronel.com/