Crater
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
The house used to hold sound
like it was something sacred.
It lived in the beams,
in the vents,
in the space between footsteps—
laughter catching in corners,
voices overlapping in the kitchen
like nothing could ever come between them.
There was a night—
she remembers it now—
when the windows were open
and the air moved freely through the rooms,
carrying music from somewhere down the street.
Someone was dancing barefoot.
Someone was burning dinner.
Someone said,
we’re okay,
and everyone believed it.
That is the part
the crater took first.
Not the walls.
Not the doors.
The belief.
After that,
everything became careful.
Voices lowered
like they might trigger something.
Footsteps softened
like the floor might give way.
He moved through the house differently then—
like someone mapping exits,
like someone already halfway gone.
Drawers opened
and did not close.
Phones rang
in other rooms.
Conversations stopped
when she entered.
She learned to listen
through walls
instead of doors.
Learned the shape of tension
by the way it bent the air.
The night it happened,
there was no explosion.
Just a sentence
spoken too plainly
to be undone.
And then—
collapse.
Not in noise,
but in structure.
The kind that holds everything up
without anyone noticing
until it’s gone.
The kitchen light flickered.
The clock kept ticking.
A glass sat untouched
on the counter.
But something beneath it all
had already given way.
In the morning,
the house was still standing.
That was the strangest part.
No ash.
No fire.
No evidence
anyone else could point to.
Just a hollow
where something whole
used to be.
Days passed.
Then weeks.
People came
and took pieces of it away.
A chair.
A lamp.
Half the books.
He left last—
not with a slam,
not with a fight,
but with the quiet certainty
of someone who had already
done the damage.
The door closed behind him
like it always had.
Like nothing had changed.
But the ground—
the ground knew.
It had already opened.
Now,
she stands at the centre of it.
Not the house—
what’s left of it.
Because this is no longer a home.
It is a crater.
Wide.
Deep.
Unmarked.
The kind people walk past
without realizing
what used to live there.
She steps carefully
around its edge,
looking down
into years she cannot retrieve.
There are pieces—
always pieces.
A laugh caught mid-air.
A plate still warm.
A version of herself
who thought love
meant permanence.
She could climb down.
She could try to gather it,
rebuild it,
convince herself
it was salvageable.
But she has seen
what happens
to people
who mistake ruins
for foundations.
So she doesn’t.
She turns—
slowly, deliberately—
and walks away from the centre
of everything that broke.
Behind her,
the earth settles.
Not healing.
Not closing.
Just…
holding it.
Because some damage
doesn’t disappear.
It becomes landscape.
And she—
she will not build her life
in the shadow
of what destroyed it.
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Poetry by Britt Wolfe:
This poem traces the slow, devastating unravelling of a home—not through spectacle, but through the quiet, accumulating moments that precede collapse. Crater explores how something once full of warmth and life can be reduced to absence without a single visible explosion, leaving behind damage that is both invisible and permanent. At its heart, it is a story about the aftermath—about standing in the hollow left behind, recognizing what cannot be rebuilt, and choosing, with painful clarity, not to remain there. It speaks to the kind of loss that reshapes a life entirely, and to the strength it takes to walk away from the ruins instead of trying to call them home again. 💚