Dollhouse

Soon my fingers

will outgrow their rooms, their miniature plates and thumb-wide
shelves, but, for now, I still

pretend water fills the bath and soap suds
fill the sink. Father is

stoic and always seated with a newspaper by
the fireplace.

Three children perch at his feet, surrounded by
toys the size

of caraway seeds—a set of blocks, a miniature train,
a baby doll. Mother waits

in the door like a dove, a vase, a pool
of cream. She is

stiller, somehow, than the rest, a pearl-handled piece of sterling
from the dowry chest,

a precious butter knife.

Meriwether Clarke is a poet and teacher living in Los Angeles, California. She holds degrees in Poetry from Northwestern University and UC Irvine’s Programs in Writing where she served as the Poetry Editor for Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters. She currently serves as a Contributing Editor for Entropy. Recent poems and reviews can be seen in Prelude, The Adroit Journal, and The Watershed Review, among others.