Dessa Bayrock

The cabin in Bellwood

 

On our first day, I press my fingers into a spider’s egg 
by accident, all cotton and caviar, dried and dead, tucked 

into the handle of the sliding glass door— some ancient hope 
now gone to seed. The door sticks in its track, opening 

just wide enough to let us in, and so we sidle out and in 
all weekend, and out again, once the heat dies down. 

Sam recounts how raccoons tried to get in over the winter, 
under the shingles, and it’s hard not to feel like interlopers,

too, even though we’re the first to open the cabin 
since we were last out in September. Now, on the hottest day 

of summer, we pull out Monopoly, trying to reimagine 
capitalism in our favour. We fail, because of course we fail, 

and when Veronika loses her last dollar, she produces cards 
and plays solitaire: mystifying, quaint, and oddly alienated 

outside of a computer screen. “I lose,” she proclaims, 
and starts again, as though it’s normal to lose yourself 

to yourself. Heat-waved in my bunk bed, I tumble into a book 
of essays about marriage. Can we reimagine this, 

too? Intimacy as inescapable as capitalism, as summer heat? 
I read the corny parts aloud, a sweet poem about old people 

fucking, and we all laugh—as if it’s ridiculous, to love 
someone forever, as if we don’t love each other, too, 

our tenderness not yet punctured like a spider’s egg.