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.
