Things We Made Into Houses
BY ROBERT MCDONALD.
Blankets, a roof over four dining room chairs, and blankets, bridging the space between
two beds. Branches,
stacked in low walls, or pulled together overhead, secured
with knotted twine.
Closets, or the hollowed-out middle of the lilac bush, the blossoms
gone brown
in June. Under the front porch, inside a pup tent, behind the couch
where the dust bunnies thrive.
Below the eaves on the back-porch roof. In a hollow
of flattened grass
in the middle of a field, in back of the nearly deserted
hotel, red-legged grasshoppers
the only other boarders. We wanted a home
adjacent
to home, a house under a pool table, a cabin
nestled
in the bathtub. We were just learning
about maps
in school, how a place in the world
might be claimed
and outlined, new states created, borders
made, blue chalk
on a square of suburban sidewalk, somewhere
a home was inside
our home, and kinder, and better. On some maps
there was a treasure,
and X
could mark that spot.
Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon, is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in 2 Rivers View, Action/Spectacle, The Tiny Journal, Le Petite Zine, Blood & Honey, Sentence, and West Trade Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago. You can find him on Instagram @robmcwriter.