Love It or List It

Do you know the show’s premise? A real
estate agent, interior designer, and a couple
with a checklist of needs who must choose
between a new house and their old remodeled.
Pull up stakes? Or reframe the past and forego
a never-inhabited future? I’ve been trying

to let go of habits that linger like garage-sale
remains: the need to patch your roof, fix
your flashing. As though we could fool the rain.
Some rooms are unlovable. I could redecorate
(call this hunger “fasting”) or move somewhere
with an open floor plan, no wall between

how I’m feeling and what you’re seeing. Every
criticism, judgment, diagnosis, expression
of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet
need. Every time your face says “stop talking,”
and I want to leave—how do I decide if I don’t
even have a list of boxes to tick? One partner

on Love It or List It always asks for a giant
laundry room, where the systole and diastole
whoosh of the washer-dryer masks any sound,
a gentle sac for the release of secretions, where
I can float among the folded piles, warm and
soothing as a mother’s voice muffled by viscera.

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Brandel France de Bravo is the author of two poetry collections, co-author of a parenting book, and the editor of a bilingual anthology of Mexican poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in various publications, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Green Mountains Review, and Gulf Coast. She is a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training,© a program developed at Stanford University.