Veronica Tucker
The House That Learned to Keep Time Differently
Lately the house has begun
to adjust the hours on its own.
The hallway lengthens toward dusk,
stretching into years
I thought I had already buried.
Footsteps echo
before anyone walks them.
In the kitchen, the light hums
with a rhythm just slightly wrong,
as if rehearsing a heartbeat
it will not need for decades.
When I open the pantry,
I sometimes find a future afternoon
folded on the top shelf
like a note I forgot to write.
The house does not threaten.
It reveals.
Each corridor opens
onto an age my children
have not yet reached
or one they left behind
without my noticing.
Tonight the living room
returns an hour from years ahead,
warm with the sound of voices
I have not heard but recognize.
The house is teaching me
that time is not a straight line here
but a devotion,
a way of holding
every version of us
until we learn to do it ourselves.
_______________
Veronica Tucker is an emergency medicine and addiction medicine physician, mother of three, and lifelong New Englander. Her poetry explores the intersections of medicine, motherhood, memory, and the unseen forces that shape daily life. Her work appears in Rust & Moth, Eunoia Review, The Berlin Literary Review, and in the anthology The Book of Jobs: Poems About Work; initial publisher: ONE ART: a journal of poetry (released Labor Day 2025), future publisher: Penn State University Libraries Open Publishing (for the accessible 2026 edition). She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and shares more at veronicatuckerwrites.com and on Instagram @veronicatuckerwrites.
Author’s Comments/Backstory: “The House That Learned to Keep Time Differently” began as a meditation on how domestic spaces quietly hold multiple timelines at once, especially during seasons of motherhood when time feels elastic rather than linear. I approached the house as a sentient but gentle presence, one that reveals rather than haunts, using ordinary household details that subtly tilt into the surreal. From a craft perspective, temporal dislocation is central. Past, present, and future coexist within single images, with enjambment and restrained diction allowing moments to stretch and overlap. The poem ultimately treats time not as chronology but as devotion, a way of holding every version of a family at once.
Editor’s Notes: The abstract image with intricate folding could certainly represent the merging of past, present, and future times (image credit by Ann Iroenkae on Pexels)