Thank You for the Offer, ADT, But No

I will bar the door tonight

Figuratively, I mean

Nobody uses doors with actual bars anymore when a deadbolt will suffice

and is more aesthetically pleasing

But sometimes the part of me that misses things I never experienced

(like soda jerks and speakeasies and hoop skirts with six-foot diameters,)

also misses having a stout blockade, a perpendicular palisade,

to bar harm from the house, an arm thrown across what is sacred

And somehow gazing with milky nostalgia
it's easy to wander backwards, disremembering
the past, through decades I never lived in,
and finally through ones I did;
how my father used to throw his arm across my chest

in the car, if he had to break suddenly;

how he stopped when I grew breasts

instead his hand hovering over the console

caught between propriety and protection;

how I never had occasion to learn

whether his arm would have made a difference

in the event of a three-car catastrophe

Maybe tonight I will not slide the deadbolt into place,

Because really, any earnest assailant with slender shoulders

could easily slip in through the doggie door,

and even if I were to outfit my house with everything
from medieval iron barricades to high-tech alarm systems

I still would not feel as safe as I did

in my father's car, with his arm outstretched