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
i. When I was a boy, Father taught me to ice-fish. Here’s a memory:
Father drills a hole; the auger bounces, vibrates, roars, shaving ice; soon, the blade connects with winter water, the engine fades off; I fish floating ice chunks from the hole with a skimmer while Father sets the trap, ties the sinker, and hooks the minnow through its side.
ii. He lowers the line gently into the fishhole; the bait plunges to the lakebed. Father reels up the slack, pitches the three legged trap above the exposed black water; we wait for a trout, or a snarled toothed pickerel. As they flop, I pull the hook out from their lips, throw them in a pail; gut them,
iii. I spill fish/thoughts/blood on the white snow.
memitim / rewatching Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel (1962)
Everything is a metaphor for the crash until the car actually hits the tree. Then it's just metal. Then it's just your knee pressed against mine in the dark, asking does this hurt, does this hurt, does this hurt?
It always hurts; that’s the point, that’s why anyone writes poetry. You pull the trigger because you want to hear the noise. You kiss me on the mouth because you want to know if there’s still meat on my bones, something to flay off of my sternum.
Listen to me: I am trying to tell you that I love you without making it sound like a Greek tragicomedy. We are driving into the lake on purpose because the water looks like silver, because the night is too big, because my hands are too busy playing with the buttons of your flannel, trying to unpick you. Do you feel that? That’s not a heart pounding in your chest, that’s an engine turning over.
Do you know that I am lying? I am trying to say: don't look back. I am trying to say: take all of that terrible, useless feeling, stuff it back into your ribcage, make it thorough, make it hurt.
the way there are stripes of light that cross my wall like small bodies of mal’achim; the way a girl once dampened me into her chest and then spit me out again, like spoiled goat; the way the crumbs that have spilled onto my bed remind me of your body;
(the way I am not a wolf like you think I am; the way there is no fur to cover my belly, my soft parts;)
the way, these days, I have felt much more related to my father than to my mother; the way, these days, there is wine in my system the same colour as the blood from father's first kill; the way, these days, I am looking at my body the way a man with a gun looks at a stag;
the way I picture a beach covered in deer kill with you somewhere in the middle of a pile of gory antlers; the way it is winter on this beach, my hips shivering with ice, your hands all over my skin, skin like the walls of a slaughterhouse;
the way your hands are somehow not trembling, but mine are, constantly.
somewhere it is 1942 / and grandfather is alone in uniformed dark hair, / flying over mountain ranges that look more / like steep moonlight than anything else. / today, the sun is sharp and pronounced. / today, I am a poet again. / I come close to crashing five times, thinking about grandfather's bald spot / and about the time he took me for ice cream. / "In Denmark, they say KEER-geh-garh" / and there's this dirge, a moor-ish thing, around us, / seven years old. two years later, / father watches his father's ashes dangle into the River Ystwyth / and I am reaching for new phonetics in grief. / what I mean is: some things are unplaceable, / like a tongue against your hard palate.
primary school (you only get one twenty sixth birthday)
in August, a reminder to self: don't forget the teenaged years. the school was painted white with green trim, and the two of us stood behind it like a pair of stag deer. remember: there is a difference between grey and white, and I am not colourblind. remember: we picked apples that tasted like the tops of mountains, apples that were coloured red like your tinted chapstick. when one girl cried, I should've remembered to mean well. when mother called, I should have remembered to answer, even after she died, even if sometimes mothers can't become poetry. it's just they do so without realizing it. remember: mothers often lack bodies. remember: women you love are never seventeen (even Jade, even your mother).
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
