This week’s poem, “House Call,” meditates on many ways to understand what a “house” can be. In this lyrical poem, poet Jan Bindas-Tenney moves through vivid and unexpected images to imagine a house as a “potentiality,” as the act of hearing and being heard, and as a body. The poem lets us open our minds not only to ideas of houses, but what it can mean to inhabit any of them.
Bindas-Tenney is a trans non-binary and queer writer, reader, fighter, lover, friend and parent living on unceded Abenaki land. They hold an MFA in nonfiction from University of Arizona. Their writing has appeared in the opinion pages of Maine newspapers, in legislative testimony, as well as in Orion, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Arts & Letters, CutBank, the Maine Review, among other places. They work at the Maine Humanities Council where they curate a weekly poetry feature on WERU Community Radio called Poetry Express.
House Call
By Jan Bindas-Tenney
This transition house of disarray and piles
and a folding couch
this tiny slot in a concrete wall some would call a con game
a flying dingy in a commodity pool
or an abducted row of air
an abundance.
I’m waiting for the house of my dreams
where gender is a tiny room of monstera plants and love birds
down a sock-slipping hallway.
A house is a potentiality
really just
like when two people record
a conversation and
then I listen and you listen and they listen
that’s a house too.
House of gusts, gulls
House of guttural embezzlements
conditional house of power
not for long house
that warm room with a door to outside, the seasonal flourish
and welcome mat
that too is a house
House of the best night’s sleep in so long
under park house of live oaks
what might look to you like an aperture
is a rose window,
a weave of relations
a pulsing hungry network of
bones, a house
encased in foam
Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “House Call,” copyright 2021 by Jan Bindas-Tenney, appears here by permission of the author.
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