This comparison is particularly potent given the ways in which domestic space is typically coded as feminine, a woman's domain. The first section introduces the poem's motif of a woman's body as a house. It is mostly a collection of vignettes that explore various aspects of the speaker's memories. "The House" is about a woman coming to terms with the way that past relationships and abuse have manifested themselves in her body and psyche, while also dealing with her own shattered sense of selfhood. The poem ends with the speaker referring to the fact that sometimes at parties, she tells people that her body is a house where love comes to die, and everyone laughs, although this is not a joke she has begun to really see herself as a kind of haunted house. The ninth section describes a knock-knock joke, it's "who's there" answered with "No one." She then goes on to suggest that he is not the only prisoner inside of her, but that she treats these prisoners well. He’s still trapped inside and makes his presence known by tracing a hand up her thigh. He fell through the trapdoor, but she hasn’t seen him since. In the eighth section, the speaker talks about her first love and, in keeping with the metaphor of the body as a house, admits that he discovered a trapdoor when he touched her breast nine years previously. She replies by saying she doesn’t resemble a doll, but a house, and describes what happened to her using the house as a metaphor. The seventh section finds the speaker recalling someone, presumably a social worker, asking her to use a doll to show where she was touched. She explains how some men begged and others promised to arrive, but never showed up. She mentions some by name: Anwar, Basil, Johnny and Yusuf. In the sixth, the speaker muses over the fact that as she grows up, more men arrive with keys to unlock her body’s doors. The fifth section describes the speaker's father lying on a table with his mouth stuffed with a red apple. In the fourth section, the speaker describes her body as people usually describe clothing, something to be slipped on and discarded. In the third section, the speaker ponders over a situation in which a woman-possibly the speaker herself-develops a plan to take a man back to her place only to have him rise back to consciousness in an ice-filled bathtub, the victim of an unidentified (but unmistakably gruesome) “procedure.” The second section begins with a Somali proverb that loosely translates to, "A missing man / lying down." It then uses dialogue to describe a sexual assault. In the first section, a speaker recalls her mother explaining to her that all women's bodies are houses-containing various locked rooms that hold a variety of emotions, such as lust, grief, and apathy-and that men sometimes come with hammers or keys and break into these rooms.
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