What happens when home is not a place of safety, but a locus of loneliness and even danger and violence? When staying at home is enforced and separation imposed? Jocelyn Ulevicus’ A Home Safe to Call Home describes a solitude and a fear around isolation wrapped in memories of past violence, and explores what finally settling into a sense of safety really means.
A Home Safe to Call Home
To be alone is a state of being, can
you tell the difference
between yourself and the
thing that was designed to be alone, pick any object
in the room, perhaps the vase with the wilting flowers,
roses gone yellow,
I can’t stand how sickly they look but watching
the petals fall onto the table sometimes reminds me
of the bottomless sea blossoming inside my body.
The last time I was touched it felt
like home—
a home that was safe to call
home where no one shouted
and I tended to the kitten if only to say
I cared enough, to say that every
birth presumes a rupture so wild, so soft.
Jocelyn Ulevicus
Jocelyn M. Ulevicus has a background in Social Work, Psychology, and Public Health. Her work is forthcoming and published in magazines such as Beyond Words, The Dewdrop, Mindful Matter, Entropy, and Life in Ten Minutes. Ms. Ulevicus currently resides in Amsterdam and is finalizing her first book, a memoir, titled The Birth of A Tree, which was recently shortlisted for the Santa Fe Writer’s Program 2019 Literary Award, judged by Carmen Maria Machado. In her spare time, she hunts for truth and beauty.
Lovely and moving poem. Thank you.