Leaving Home by Tula Francesca

Leaving Home

This is how our family works.
We girls have moved out.
We are in our 20s, 30s –
we are living in Brooklyn, India,
dark basement apartments, bamboo huts.
We are still young.
We have left boxes and photographs
in our closet at home. They are on
high shelves, the boxes talk to each
other and pay no rent. A good life.
Then our parents decide
it is enough. They want their space back.
First they ask politely, Can you come get your
boxes? No response. Later they get tough.
Take your stuff. But the stuff is insurmountable.
It must be “gone through.” Young people
do not have time for this delicate
sorting of their own layers.
The pleading stops.
Our parents do the only thing left to do.
They remove the closet.
Poof, no more high shelves. Just a wall.
We come home and the space is rearranged
like a face on mushrooms.
There, they say, pointing to the hallway.
There are your boxes.

*

Tula Francesca (she/her) is a writer, artist, editor, and zine maker in Petaluma, California. Her work has appeared in Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, Crab Creek Review, FENCE, Feral, FLARE, Fron/tera, The Inflectionist Review, RHINO, and other places. She is the author of chapbook If There Are Horns, and microchap This Was Like I Said All Gone. Francesca is a left-handed, bipolar, animist creator. web: francescapreston.com instagram: @francescalouisepreston