The poem's title signals that what follows will be about some kind of home. Dharker herself has said that she had the slums of Mumbai, India in mind when she wrote this poem—but that location isn't specifically referenced in the poem, nor is it necessary for making sense of the poem's setting and broader significance.
The first thing to notice about the poem is its slenderness. Most of the lines are very short, making the poem appear thin on the page. Even before the poem starts, then, there is a suggestion both of construction (the poem itself) and fragility (the thin, almost wispy block of text).
In the poem's opening lines, the speaker launches into a kind of survey of the building in question. The speaker evaluates the dwelling's appearance, implicitly comparing it with a more typically constructed house. Whereas houses usually (and, of course, it's important to remember that this is a generalization) are designed with "straight lines," "parallel" angles, and "flat" surfaces, this building is missing all of those stabilizing features. The speaker is not being critical, necessarily, but rather seems to be making a set of observations that informs the reader of the structure's precariousness—it shouldn't stand strong, yet it does.
Enjambment and caesura are key techniques that the poem uses to convey this precariousness throughout. The line-break after "enough" in line 1 makes the meaning of the line incomplete until line 2, which then has an intentionally awkward caesura after the word "lines." This means that "That" in line 2 becomes a fragment, which is then completed by line 3 ("is the problem"). The haphazard way that the sentences unfold mimics the improvised method with which the living space has been put together.
At the same time, the sentences do make sense—that is, the grammar itself isn't fragmented or disrupted. So the poem is also suggesting structural soundness because, after all, the home is a functional living space—it works. This underlying coherence is also hinted at by the assonance in "flat" and "parallel," the vowel sounds hanging together like the dwelling itself. The same is true of the "that"/"flat" rhyme across lines 2 and 4, and the /t/ consonance that runs throughout these opening lines: "just," "not," "straight," "That," "flat."