In our father’s house
a question mark lived in the room next to ours
Other parts of speech wandered the halls
Commas wept at the windows
colons twisted in their beds
exclamation points choked our throats
Our speaking marks were empty
We consented to the lock and key of his rules
Anything to avoid his bedroom
where the full sentence lived
The dash was impossible
We only dreamed of it, my sisters and I
while periods stopped us dead
stopped the unpunctuated, grammarless dreams
we ought to have been having
where no participles were left dangling
no subject was deprived of agency
no object hurled and shattered
and no verb ever locked a door
We were the ellipses hanging at the end of things
the ellipses
suggesting something better to come
three who barely made a mark
His rules and principles
Do not break a sentence in two
Keep to one tense
And as to his lessons on style
Place yourself in the background
Do not overstate
or affect a breezy manner
Never use dialect unless your ear is good
Do not inject opinions
or take shortcuts
Their hollers, his hounds boarded up for the night
What did they know or care for style or speech
The empty bowl was their only rule
An old ladder he was too drunk to remove
angled against the house like one side of a letter
A for abase
A for abjure
All the way down, its rungs and rails
shaped another letter
H for home
for heartbreak
All the way down
the dash we only dared once
That night the hounds lay quiet in their kennels
as if they knew
Six girl feet, twenty paws wrote the word escape
on the earth
We took the lessons in those woods
the decisions of ferns
the listening skills of lichen
the jousted calamities of fallen limbs
We bore the trials of trees
the harelips of bark, their cleft palates
wired jaws
Lichen dusted our spellbound toes
It was scent now that mattered
finding us the shortcut through the woods
to a road
which would stretch before us like a long unfinished thought
not yet put into words
You are only three words, he said to us once
And a sentence with three words
is taking the rules of concision too far
We were there
We were gone
Three relative clauses running through the trees