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Pallikoodam
When it rained, even our shoes
turned green. The fan whirred
except when the power was out,
then we read by candlelight under
the mosquito net, or didn’t:
I feared it going up
around us, a fuzz of flame.
We lived with animals: small lizards
darting up the walls, lines of tiny,
imperious ants. Every night
we tried to trap the rat
in the rafters, baiting him with banana
until finally we awoke to a
snap. We had a small television
and we watched old sitcoms, new
pop videos, the twin towers falling
again and again. They said over
and over that nothing would be
the same after that, and for once
they were right. We ate chocolate bars
for their sweet familiarity, and we lined
books neatly on the shelves. We slept
holding each other and woke in the mornings
to hear someone singing, softly,
as she swept the yard clean.
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Charlotte Boulay’s first book of poems, Foxes on the Trampoline, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2014. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, The Boston Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, The Pinch, and Crazyhorse, among other journals. She lives in Philadelphia and works at The Miquon School as both a fundraiser and COVID prevention specialist.
*note: The word pallikoodam means “school” in Malayalam, the language of Kerala, India.
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Ernst Stuckelberg, The Girl with the Lizard, oil on canvas, 2019