by the time we were home, the bottom halves of our black dresses were brown with dust.
the funeral was short, did not encompass the world.
it was outdoors, where the wails of the women and the cries, the urgencies and justifications of the men, could spiral into the stomach of the sky, wait for response.
it struck me halfway through, that the river situated next to the graveyard kept running despite the death, that it was a sunny day, that the ants in the grass still climbed through the woven grass, that they still walked, and worked --
our wails did not reach past our ears, in fact, and by the time i was home, my mourning was left back with the dust that had stolen it, was something dry and gone, was something else entirely.
They are massive. They have grown longer than I have been alive, have rooted themselves into the foundations of the house. When I get down on my hands and knees, I hear breathing coming from the crawlspace - we lift them up, unsnarl them from the soil and the bugs and the garden, and eat them.
My father taught me to chant with rhythm. We clapped our hands against our thighs, at first, called out like animals or wild people -- because he liked to make the distinction -- and then we hit whatever would be loud, the drums of pots and pans and cups, the hard, lined faces of oaken tables, the cement, which grew so hot in the summer, it felt as though it might spread thin enough to make a sound.
We chant, and eat, and pray. There is nothing particularly magical or sacred about it. Sometimes I hit the hollow of the dry rain barrel, when we are outdoors and it is warm, and I wonder which hit will be the one to break through the old wooden slats. With each strike, a whisper of dust goes up and makes me cough. If it rained, I don't think we could drink from the barrel, because all of the water would be mud, but we keep it, for hoping.
We eat them because it is the right thing to do. They are made for consumption; they have been waiting. They are a distillation of an experience, something that Father says I would not understand. They taste like salt, like the purple earthiness of beets, coarse and real and hungry.
I hear him speaking to my bedridden mother through the small thin door, how he is praying for her. She says that he is angry, and he hits the wall and the booming prayer of it resounds through the house, breathes with the crawlspace, makes something inside of us rain, at last.
It is autumn now. It is best to remember that. There are many things dying here: first we find a dead bird nestled in the branches of the Pyracantha bush, where its gray feathers are almost lost in all its red, and then we find a squirrel, thinned and spread against a foot in the street, and then the tiniest shell of a spider, tangled and splayed in the net of its home. I say that it has simply shed itself -- it hasn't. The leaves fall. The plants die. Even the tiled roof of my neighbor's house drops its slats and they crash to the street, shatter, cut my feet. It is easy to forget what falling feels like -- how bright we bleed.
His obituary was in the newspaper today. My grandmother bought eight copies of them. She always seemed to have a copy clenched between her white hands as if she might tear it to pieces, and she read the ashen headlines again and again as if it was all printed because of him. She cried over them, saying, "They're beautiful! It's beautiful! He was so beautiful," and doesn't wear black. The front page is about drought restrictions: how the world is drying up and disappearing.
My grandmother tired of mourning even before his death, and when it happened, it seemed as if his hand was just finally slipping from her grasp. She mourned for two years, growing smaller and thinner as he did too, breaking herself in her care for him as he developed a beak and shallow breathing and a ribcage that barely knew how to rise. The knowledge of his death was so heavy as she sat next to him that sometimes the "will"s and the "are"s slid together. We would gently pull her from the room, wonder if we would cry, say "He is dead, but still listening grandmother. Still here, grandmother."
Now that he is gone, she plants flowers in the backyard. She fills the world up with the precious water that needs saving, points to his portrait where it hangs all over the house, and say, "Look, look at how beautifully he lived."
people plant themselves in the voice of me as if i am god --
i speak and light blooms in the trellis of their bones, bursts from their pores and climbs the long well of their throats
I ask if they are real, and they say they are brothers; one writes and the other puts out fires with teeth, eats up everything that everyone else makes.
they are both freckled. they say their mother had red hair but theirs is black
i tell them that they are kissed by angels, that their wings used to cover me when i slept that i could hear their voices echo out of me when i was first waking,
honest and curled in prayer under my blankets, tiny bodied and eight years old,
that when the earth quaked their hands could help steady it that the foundations of their ashen bones would bring us closer to something like euphoria, that they could speak in tongues if they wanted, cross their hands and pray to the universe
the boys from the village heard that we were a witch -- that we told stories and licked blood off of knives, that we brewed toads and centipedes into our morning coffee, that we ate bread infested with weevils and pulled herbs from their roots. we cackled and danced, and told them stories of their mothers and their fathers and the taste of greed coursing through the blood of their hands, how gold makes men into ghouls.
imperious as the spine arch of a cat or the child who has been given a paper crown
she told me to slow my breathing, quicken my hands, soften my words and then clothed me in the questions of people who do not will not exist --
it is easy to forget how my body is an autonomous machine, how I am always pumping blood and breath and words regardless of yes or no that I exist in separation
artificial eyes see only gridded land, the diagram and organ- bodies of humans, do not know the loss of gravity, the underwater of not remembering how to dream, absence.
my poem flickers curls eats like an animal with animal teeth which doesn't mean not human, but means angry and scared and too quiet to move; when i walk down streets, i think of writing how i am a cliche of a character as if i were a story or an object
---- it is scary telling yourself you are not a person again and again
we painted the old room and told ourselves that the young never die, that ghosts fade away out of sight when they can't recognize where they used to live
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