Podcast Episode: When the House Tilts

Pip: Genie Nakano writes a poem about running away from a thirty-six-year marriage — and somehow makes it the most honest love letter you'll read this week.

Mara: That's exactly the territory we're in today — a freeverse poem about abandonment, survival, and what it takes to stay.

Pip: Let's start with the house that tilts.

When the House Tilts

Mara: This poem opens a question that most people spend a lifetime not asking: why do we flee the things we most want to keep?

Pip: The poem names the pattern directly — four marriages, two long-term partners counted as "commercial breaks between divorces," and a thirty-six-year relationship that has somehow held. And then it turns inward.

Mara: The line that anchors everything is this: "Why do I do this — abandon before I'm abandoned? It's the math of childhood: Mom disappears into a hospital at three. Dad vanishes into a sanitarium at six. Two years later — separation, then divorce. My heart learns subtraction before it learns love."

Pip: That's the whole architecture of the poem in six lines. The running isn't irrational — it's a survival equation learned before the speaker could read.

Mara: And the poem is specific about what the running looks like now, at seventy-seven and a half — the words "I'm leaving," the literal broken foot from fleeing so hard she snapped three metatarsals, and the husband who rushed home anyway.

Pip: There's a detail that quietly devastates: she sometimes resents that Hideki's stroke has taken words from him, and then catches herself taking his forgetting personally — "as if forgetting a sentence means forgetting me."

Mara: The poem doesn't let that cruelty sit unexamined. It names the shame directly — "shame sits beside me like a cold cup of tea" — and then pivots to something more fragile than resolution.

Pip: Not a cure. More like a decision made at dusk.

Mara: The closing image is the sky going pink, then lavender, then the speaker choosing: "Love is a practice — a returning, a staying. I want to stop running from ghosts that are no longer chasing me."

Pip: At its core this is a poem about the gap between the child who learned that love ends and the elder who has evidence — thirty-six years of it — that it doesn't have to.

Mara: And it ends not with certainty but with intention: "Maybe this time I'll keep my suitcase in the closet."

Mara: The math of childhood — subtraction before love — is a hard equation to unlearn.

Pip: But apparently lavender skies help. More from this corner of the internet next time.