Happy New Year! Here's a poem:

Hollow houses

Widows sit in wooden chairs

By windows looking nowhere.

Empty nests built up, accumulated,

Repaired, settled into, aged.

I drive past houses I know are empty,

Empty.

Empty.

Where once men lived, too

Loving and shouting, laughing and aching,

Eventually dying.

The widows put Christmas lights around the doors,

Halloween pumpkins on the porch,

Their widow cars rest like crypts in unvisited garages at night.

Inside, beds are piled high with comforters. 

They are old women now.

They grow older every day and their husbands’ missing presences

Grow stronger.

If I didn’t know any of this, I imagine I’d drive by some day and think,

“Now there’s a household,”

As the lights, car in the drive and cared-for lawn pass and grow smaller behind me.

Like a tree, appearing perfect until the wind storm breaks it in half,

Showing everyone it was entirely hollow.