Ode to my Youngstown Apartment

This is another poetry workshop assignment we had to write an Ode*.
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Your shuttered skin is soft blue, your picture window eyes
staring at the orphan mansions in front of you.
You look like you're suffocating and
I wonder how. So lovely in doing so but still
no one notices you.
Cars pass by the blue house on Illinois.
So happy to not have passed by you and
pass through your side door –
a hole in your body covered with a sheet,
images of stained and sad blue ducks.
Your bottom parts hold treasures in the form
of cobwebs that glisten
on an old metal refrigerator.
Rats, like ghosts, that scrape
the inside of your walls.
I imagine many are buried there underneath
the off-white of your flesh.
I live inside your belly,
shuffle my feet on your oak floors,
as I fill my own.
Mail slot on the side,
doors to nowhere: dark empty rooms.
A mystery like a preserved body of a saint,
You are so beautiful, marked in a time you never left.



*Obviously, note the title.