926 W. Grove

926 W. GROVE

my boyhood home was

                        calm and serene

until the day when

firefighters rushed in

to put out a small fire

burning undetected

under the house in the

                        crawlspace

I remember playing

                        in the backyard

amid honeysuckle bushes

how stray cats pissed in the sandbox

the soccer goal my father built for me

how my errant kick sent the ball

crashing through the plate glass
                        window

I stopped by for a look

                        in my twenties

the house still standing but

smaller than in memories

dingy and dilapidated like the

neighbourhood surrounding it

grass growing knee high

                        I looked

on Google Maps and found it

                        burned down

fire gets what it wants eventually

now it’s just a vacant lot on a quiet

street in a quiet town in Texas

where the moist black dirt smells

the same as it always has but

                        everything else changed

 J. Archer Avary

J. Archer Avary is a former television journalist, marine conservationist, and champion lionfish hunter. His work has appeared in Bright Flash Literary Review and Guernsey Poets. He was born in Albuquerque, NM and lived in several US cities including Omaha (NE), Milwaukee (WI), Asheville (NC) and Atlanta (GA) before moving to Grand Cayman in 2014. He currently resides in Guernsey with his wife where he is a furloughed aviation worker.