It started small—
a brass doorknob with teeth,
clamping down on my knuckles
every time I came home
too late,
too loud,
too me.

The carpet grew a tongue,
polyester rasping my soles
cataloging every place
I was forbidden to run.

I stopped running.
I learned to stand still,
let myself
be swallowed whole.

Cabinets slammed their mouths shut,
stuffed with silence.
Walls blanched white,
erasing every word
that might have been mine.

They called it love.
I named it erasure.

By spring,
my voice turned to mulch,
my ribs gnawed to pickets,
a fence collapsing
in a yard no one tended.

When it ended,
there was no crash, no roar—
just a perfect square,
grinning through cracked windows,
sated.

Now, in sleep,
I still knock.
The door yawns open
hinges unspooling
into a mouth
I once called home—

and I wake
with the dull, feral ache
of a childhood
I will never reclaim.