Breaking & Entering

Here, the kitchen or hearth aims east; the bedroom window, the old apple tree aim west. A plastic handle on bedroom window was jammed, cracked off. They must have come through the cellar. Sledge hammered the door from its hinges and after a ramshackle tour broke the office window to get out. Wasn't there a way to catch them, rub carbon paper over what they'd touched? Or did you have to trap the stolen air, sift pure graphite into the traces of motion? Hard to discern what they were looking for, what they had stolen except for home−its intactness.

scattered on the bed
a constellation
of loose change