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He owns seven New Balance shoes, all rights
that have lost in this house their one-time partners.
In other words, he has—we have—lost
all the lefts.

Also in residence: four thousand dollars of pasta
and tampons, power tools and chocolates
for shipment to strangers, he’s vacuuming his roof past
midnight, his neighbor reports, amused.

Requiring immediate action: Your father
has started blowtorching the weeds
in his yard, I’m worried he’s going to
catch his and our house on fire.

Neurologists decipher gray and white blobs,
scanned along what I’m told is my father’s
frontal lobe. Surprising: memory
here is typically relatively

preserved. Instead: progressive
decline in behavior, language,
movement. Not that it started here
—not that I know where it started.

All his friends stopped visiting
probably when he stopped
inviting them, a decade or two ago.
Now we’re all embarrassed.

Did you know rats and roaches
are social creatures? A mischief
of rats, an intrusion of roaches, a
collapse of persons. In this house

I watch a roach mother and her young
dance across the knives, over dinner
platters for parties not hosted, into
mildewed piles they seem to call home.