as perfect and literary as sartorial, but of or relating to home, space, living place, personal, not a magazine page, but an expression of attitude, emotion, desire, tension, history, a reflecting pool of the mind where it was and where it wants to be and of course where it can never be, now. (The present.)

Decorial?*

(Come inside. I have recently reorganized condensations of my past, my current maps, my relationship status, the future toward which I try, I am trying, to lean. See here. Sit down. Look there. Stir your honey with tea, murmuring. Feet to the fire. Answer me.)

There must be a word. Tense and elusive, a word inked mid-page on your yellow love letter, an epistolary word. A rusty word pinned under your great grandfather’s war medal. Honorary, apologia, unfree. A word braiding praise, struggle, disease, comfort, collision, solemnity, and naked abandon at four in the morning. An insomniac word. Studious, serious, sincere, whispered, obligatory, archaic. Shoring up dreams. Succors: reinforcements of troops.

Existential. Of or relating to existence. Crucial. Critical. (I need it?) A crux, a crossroads, a fingerpost missing direction.

Material. Living standards have now raised. Relational. Connecting two or more. Situational. Circumstances surrounding this dark heart; I need a light. Luminal, not at home with a serial-killer-killer, no (a ruined word). Designational (see above, who is in charge of the war?). Occupational. (I tried to avoid utopia–but maybe that is the ticket, one, to nowhere, please, next horizon, just past fashionland? Tangential.) Primal. Perennial. (Deer?) Animal. Gastronomical. Yes, at meals, one hopes, or you could only smoke, though not in the world where we frown too much.

Taxonomical. Of or relating to classification. Epistemological. Of or relating to knowledge and knowing. Exegetical. Of or relating to the interpretation of texts. Eschatological. Of or relating to the end times. Martial. Of or relating to war. Rhetorical. Of or relating to the art of rhetoric. Art. Of. There must be a word.

Graphic, design, decor, ornamental, internal, interior, domestic, domicile. Domiciliary?

Periodical, occasional, interval, a major third, a perfect four, the golden mean, an open door.

Live, living, livable. Space, spatial. Of or relating to space. Home, a place where something flourishes. Comfortable, territorial, intentional, natural.

In the quilts I had found good objects—hospitable, warm, with soft edges yet resistant, with boundaries yet suggesting a continuous safe expanse, a field that could be bundled, a bundle that could be unfurled, portable equipment, light, washable, long-lasting, colorful, versatile, functional and ornamental, private and universal, mine and thine.

–Radka Donnell-Vogt

*appropriated from a certain literary sass