Pretend Your Foot is a House

My child is a poet. He says, Pretend your foot is a house so I can safely live there.

My foot becomes a house. We crawl inside. I lay out carpets and push the furniture against the arch of my foot so we can have dance parties and eat pizza on the floor. Against my heel, I hang his school art projects on the refrigerator. He goes to sleep in my pinky toe, and I flip the pillow over to the cool side for him. He snores gently and I pull the covers around his chin. The moonlight streams in through the toenail. I close the curtains and turn out the light. From my room in the big toe, I can hear him breathing. The cats chase a mouse across my instep in the darkness.

He forgets. I have always been his home. When he was a flutter, I would say, silently, in a language he could hear, You are safe. At night, I would walk through the house—the real house, which is not my foot—in the dark and the silence. My feet (where he wishes to safely live) against the wood floors, soles unfurling against the cool trees. When I crawled into bed and turned out the light, he would spring to life. Laying on my right side, I would reach across my glowing frame. One hand cradling the space where we would curl up and fall asleep. One hand cradling my own face.

My ankle remembers what he forgets. I hang lights in its vaulted ceiling, illuminating a gothic tower that holds our history. Flying buttresses spring outward from my bones to cradle us both, to steady us against uncertainty. When it is cold, the joists shift and creak. We patch over the places where the light gets in. We dry our socks in the fireplace of my heel.

You have always safely lived in the home of my body. There is always room to return.