Definitely Not a Trap Door

It came with the East Hollywood rental place: that novelty

polypropylene doormat screen-printed

in moldy oak planks, medieval spade-strap hinges,

and forged iron pull ring. At my feet, a phrase

in black gothic font: Definitely Not a Trap Door. I laugh,

though jet-lagged from the early flight, I’m almost

afraid to step on it. A year ago, I stepped from my life

in Los Angeles and fell into what I thought

could be a new one in Richmond, Virginia,

my old city. Home is a slippery notion, isn’t it,

Sara Kate said when I told her I was moving back

to L.A. as we sat side by side in the damp

crabgrass at the folk festival. I still miss Brooklyn

every day, she sighed. We’re both Virginia girls,

and Sara Kate can really rock long armpit hair. I always

forget to buy new razors and so drag

the dull blades across my pits until they burn,

the only inches of skin I ever allowed to turn red

in Los Angeles. I wore the floppiest sun hats, creepy peach

fingerless spf gloves for the car. The new apartment

is on the top floor of the building, and if I pried

this trap door open, I’d drop seven stories down

to North St. Andrews Place, where the man who lives

out of his camper van walks blocks with a blue dolly

every other day to fill a five-gallon drum.

He uses it to water his sidewalk garden of potted palms

arranged on side tables around a single, deep-green monstera.

In middle school, Sara Kate’s dad left to track Bigfoot,

started living out of his car in the woods near Ragged

Mountain Reservoir. She doesn’t talk about him much, tucked

his ghost into a small cell with a hatch in the floor

I won’t ask her to open. I didn’t know the French word

for dungeon cell, oubliette, comes from oublier: to forget.

Somehow, I forgot everything about the South I’d wanted

to escape in the first place: the humidity hot and soggy

as the back of a mouth, the Easter bunnies and pink

plastic eggs decorating the dentist’s office, the men

—like Keith the Subaru sales rep—who collect

Civil War relics and recite for you their entire family

tree rooted in a Goochland County tobacco

farm since the eighteenth century. Where did I

shove all this stuff? Before my dad left

Mississippi for good and joined the Peace Corps, he stood

in a small bathroom stall in the back of the dive bar

Max by the Tracks, in Jackson, about to take a leak

when he noticed a phrase in Greek script

graffitied above the toilet. He returned with a cocktail

napkin and a pen, copied the scrawl,

brought his transcription to the Episcopal priest

who taught Greek and Latin at Millsaps. The priest

laughed as he translated—It says, “My shit don’t stink”—

then noted the vandal’s colloquial

use of the contraction. Since his stroke, my dad

can no longer read, although he can still tell me a story.

As I recall it, I lift the iron pull ring of the trap door

in East Hollywood and drop into the middle of that June

back in Jackson, where a creaking hinge of a bathroom

stall door needs oiling and the town air reeks of lager piss

and mystery. He always taught me you’ve got to get in close

to open it. You’ve got to write everything down.