Sofia Fall

Silo

What was home like? For me
it was always driving the same lone road
by the granite quarry—an outsized,
familiar disfigurement I’d trained

my eyes to skip over all my life. But beyond
that stretch of broken earth the road
was very ordinary: the barns in disrepair, deer
shooting through the woods, one single

circuitous apple tree. The bottom of the hill
where once when I was seventeen I’d collided
with a possum in the middle of the night,
coming home from somewhere I wasn’t

supposed to be. That’s all there was—
the road, and then the final left turn
to the house with the steepest driveway,
and I never remember the part—

never remember how—no matter what hour
it was I’d try to avoid being noticed
by my father in his chair on my way up the stairs
and down the hallway, how it’s only the road

and then a blankness, the way his stories
about his own childhood always contained
a familiar hole—a disfigurement I tried
to skip over—the way he used to talk

about his mother and the airplane
glue and her chasing him in circles around
the silo, although when I drove back there
down the road to their yellow house recently

there wasn’t a silo. And the people
who lived there now said they were certain
there never had been.

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Sofia Fall is a writer from Michigan. Her work has been published in the anthology collection Dear Human at the Edge of Time: Poems About Climate Change in the U.S. and The Allegheny Review, where she was the recipient of the 2018 Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Fulbright Program and the Hopwood Foundation. She has a BA in English and Program in the Environment from the University of Michigan and an MA in Climate & Society from Columbia University.