Extreme Domesticity
After Susan Fraiman
The women of the house glide through it, are unseen
as children, are children. I did not make these angels.
I, full-grown woman, live outside with a spade,
burying the Angel of the House, the Angel who lived here long before I did.
Her wings fold over her Christian crossed arms and shroud her in the dust swept
from the Castle Otranto. I bury her. And now
she lives dead under a burdened stone, the epitaph reading mother, grandmother,
great, great, great, ad infinitum—
I buried the Angel of the House with her petticoat, her hole-punched ballot, flower-
pressed rewildings.
When I return to the house, the half-grown women are in love with each other
and the world. Here, I am a visitor. I live outside. I bury the Angel.
I hang the sheets out to bird-flap in the wind and they turn into dry wall. At my back,
my bed linens are feathered, spectral. I’ve done them one thousand times. I say:
I’ve never been an Angel.
If and when I go into deep ground for myself, I will wrap myself around the Angel of
the House and beg to make a new domesticity.
My white dress is flour-dusted with dirt but I do not remove it. My husband bakes a
pie and is dressed in spoiled blueberries. Tell me I am a beautiful ghost, a dirty, dirty
ghost, I demand. Angel, bury me!