Large
Large enough to eat in and then some
Acres of naked floor
Laminate
Flowering brown circular stains, a memento to careless tipped hands holding mugs full of coffee
The old wood table sits shrunken in the corner
Populated with cereal boxes and pages torn from spiral notebooks
Windows, dust streaked, illuminated by the sunlight reflecting through a yellow circle of hanging stained glass
Picked out of a box on the sidewalk marked, “name your price”
Electric spirals or was it iron crosshairs over flame?
I don’t remember
Probably the former.

She was a grand old dame humbled by generations of rapacious landlords gauging students passing through like ships in the night, to her
She was an ancient oak in which we cooked and laughed and danced and wept
With serious house business around the kitchen table met
My lover and I, relishing the sound of that, “my lover and I”
We cooked the meals of the newly initiated
Recently liberated
Maruchan ramen and Campbell’s tomato soup
Just looking back the sodium dries my mouth
I’m thirsty for spaghetti and meatballs with fresh baked garlic bread
A bottle of cheap red wine
Friends with the closeness only youth can afford
Time enough to spare
Time enough to discuss Foucault and Patricia Hill Collins and satellite States and gay pride
It’s a new era
The 80s are over
And anything and everything is possible.