Scuttle

I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be.
Eight, allergic to dust,
asthmatic, stigmatic
with mystery rashes,
balanced tiptoe on a stack
of peat briquettes
wound in butcher’s twine,
fingers smutty from
Suttons Premium Polish Coal.
In that bungalow
shadowed by mountain, things
clenched past function—
blunt tools, used batteries.
Hand-me-down grudges.
Where do you dispose of them,
old keys? One’s blue-green
brass with smoky thumb stain,
chunky, no discernible fit
with anything begun since me.
Layabouts could scan clouds
in that pinhole in its head.
This memory flukes through it.
And I press the edge,
the teeth, till it hurts.