Two Poems by Jennifer Christgau Aquino

The One Percent Rule

I take the real estate blurbing job for money. But the lifestyle of dreaming is a perk. In the middle of the week, when everyone hunches inside glass conference rooms or school, I slip into a dress and gold ballet flats. On a tree-lined lane or private drive or at the end of a tucked-away cul-de-sac with good walkability, I enter coming-soon estates so vast they sometimes require more than one notebook. I graze fingertips through lavender fields, circle lap pools, peer into manicured forests. I cool my cheeks on limestone plastered walls seamlessly running hallways with no end. They can afford to get wet and not deteriorate. There are kitchens with butler pantries and two islands. Double ovens, double dishwashers, side-by-side refrigerators hidden so well you have to know. Always two sets of laundry machines, with at least one in the walk-in closet. Who wouldn’t want the convenience? At the top of the stairs, views extend over the birds to the sea, to the sun draped hills, to the other side of the Bay. The movie theater features stadium seating, popcorn machines and glass candy cases. The wine room’s brick groin ceiling sounds atrocious, but really is like staring into the chiseled cheekbones of a Greek beauty. Craftsmen from Italy were summoned to build this. Smoked wooden planks traveled by boat from Asia. Plants were curated from places I have to consult a map to find. I take notes to remember it all. The grass is brushed and inviting frolic. The windows so clear you miss them. The laundry always done. The refrigerator so white-white inside, not a slimy lettuce leaf in sight. The apples are polished, the toilet paper roll full and the soap in the bathroom is a bouquet of bay leaves tied in twine. It smells like cedar. Like musk. Like warm summer. Like nothing is wilting. I walk barefoot, collecting the feeling of cold terrazzo, honed and polished concrete, of zebra wood, which is also found in Prada’s flagship Manhattan store. I touch walls and doorknobs worth more than my wedding ring. Sometimes, if it’s sunny, I dare to sit in a lounge chair in the Tuscan garden, trimmed in non-fruit bearing olive trees. No mess! I close my eyes and I can hear the bees inside the lavender; the butler with the tea coming. I leave in my dented Honda, parked outside the gates. I drive the flea’s highway, with the other common folk. We form our own colony, buzzing below. I write it all up, searching a thesaurus for elevated words to describe this life. Contemporary, sophisticated, sleek, handsome, refined, cathedral. I leave instructions for how to live in the house. Imagine, bathe, unwind. After a while language seems to lose its power. So I write this.
The sunlight in the
Medici mirror
will make you
glow at
1 p.m.

The Architecture of The Living

The doorbell always startled the lamp.

The windows danced with swampy-looking ghosts between their panes. At night they disappeared into a song of darkness.

More than once a bird mistook our living room for the great outdoors and the windows taught them a lesson.

On certain days when our house shrank in cold, the closet door slid open to reveal all the toilet paper and cleaning supplies, like a hostile suggestion.

The credenza couldn’t stay; we knew the fireplace found it overbearing. And yet, the sunlight in the afternoon was so beautiful on her face.

The photograph of the children as a penguin and Mary Poppins fell so many times when the Jolly Holiday cast learned to slam doors that we left it glassless and crooked to save on frame costs and the ache of straightening it out.

The chair and the dog had a torrid relationship. So did the cat’s claws and the back of the couch.

Once, when the dog ate a cake dressed as a blue narwhal, the carpet tried to hide it all, but it was too much to conceal in the end.

There are, at least, ten fish buried in the hem of a flourishing pinwheel succulent.

The sliding glass door fell out of love with the foundation and smiled with a gap we could never close.

The shower knob was a trickster that liked to pop off when we were blinded by face soap.

Everyone’s favorite spot to be barefoot was the tile between the front door and the coat closet, where the radiant heat rushed to find our soles.

After my father died, all the drops in a storm collected in the lowest point on our roof. It poured tears through the tiniest gap in the ceiling between the kitchen sink and oven.