Breathing in the Mildewed Years

The wooden stairs groan like they’re warning me off.

Down here, the air is thick enough to chew,

a heavy soup of wet cardboard and cold concrete,

and the laundry detergent that never quite finished its view

of the stains. There’s a box of tax returns from 2004

softening into mulch in the corner near the drain.

It smells like the things we hide under the floor,

the slow, quiet rot of everything we couldn't explain.

The washing machine has been weeping for a decade,

a slow, rusted leak that the floorboards just drink.

I’m standing in the dark, inhaling the failure,

trying to remember what I used to think.