my family tree is knotted and webbed, but every member has a place, and if you’re lucky, a purpose. my mother’s purpose is to cook soup for the Passover Seder. I picture Passover as bloody as when the planets forget to flash across the sky. this happens. I have seen it the way I’ve seen a girl look at me from across a wooden table.
ii. this is not me angry.
I can never remember. when I walk by you, I make sure to shuffle my feet even quicker than I usually do, because I want to forget about my body. I don’t look in mirrors anymore. I don’t even look into my favourite lake anymore. the way it wrinkles together hurts as much as my father’s nails do, my father scraping against my scalp.
iii. you were good for something but don’t ask me exactly what.
in a dream, you had brown hair that reached down to your jawline, and you filled the gaps of your teeth with orange juice to raise your blood sugar. your spine must have curved outwards like fields of orchids. back then, standing with you, my stomach was as sharp as a state I’d never been to.
I’d never been to Georgia, with its heat.
I am not cold, not anymore. I was reborn in the state far north of here, the state with the birds (flycatchers, kingbirds, vireos) and the gas station. the gas station never caught on fire, although I had a dream of you in my bed: in it, you were on fire, the fire mixed with heartburn.
you must remember that I like to sit in your brown wool armchair, and smoke cigarettes, and listen to music on the record player, in the wooden house, the one next to the lake. I don’t know how to lucid dream, either.
there’s already dirt in my bed. 1995 is the year the weather broke, the year my grandfather died, the year mother and father got into their first argument.
these days: I am always jealous of my father. these days: I tell more jokes to make people laugh.
2000 is the year I fell through my mother’s uterus, blood circling my scalp. 2000: the year we all became planets. my eyes are the same as my father’s, my hands are his hands.
(what this means is: my nails gather dirt easily.)
every July, it’s my brother (before the accident) asking me how many people will have to die in my poems before I’ll finally be able to make up my mind. I can’t stop seeing blue faces against white lakes, a picture of us huddled together by a bonfire. still, I stand on your back deck like molars in a mouth, trying to remember how easily a person can enter another person. you tell me it goes something like this: first through the lips, then beneath the tongue, then into the ribcage.
I know you're wrong. I know this because I can feel it in my knees like my mother can feel thunderstorms in her arthritis-ridden fingers. I correct you, tell you it is more like nuclear winter, inhaling ash and soot, lungs black like your grandfather after a cigar. (your grandfather and I were the same in that we both liked burning.)
August again and I take you to the coast (the mouth of the River Ystwyth); summer of '21 is the hottest summer; we are both barefooted, our toes grassy and sticky with sweat
here, this water is for you; here, you have a body all strung up and twisted like a wavelet; I am picking flowers just for you, near the dock, (for your hair): hydrangeas and lupines
this is both how it ends, how it begins: my hands, deep in your chest; yours, edged around my shoulders
