critical phenomena

As a last ditch effort, I subscribed to Ancestry.com to sift through yearbook photos. I am constantly battling modernity. Every night, I walk myself through guided meditations on uncovering one’s true self and overcoming grief. Imagine standing in the library, imagine there is a large bay window and the light from the window is shining down on you. Imagine that you are basking in the light, scrutinizing James Joyce until you can pretend to know what you are talking about. Imagine that your father is there with you, that he loves literature and poetry just as you love literature and poetry. Imagine that he has a mullet, since the last yearbook photo you saw of him was in the eighties and it's still lodged deep in your subconscious. Imagine you are happy, and all is well, and nobody you know has died yet.

I knew that I would find you there. I know this because you are dead. I can't visit your body anymore, and I wouldn't even if I could, so I'm left scouring digital archives to find any trace of you. This is what is left of you, then: a twenty-five dollar subscription, a sweater in my closet, a two-minute video of you discussing your research (the structure and energetics of polyelectrolytic bundles, such as double-stranded DNA), a dissertation from the nineties, and a few boxes of your notebooks. I was so scared to open those boxes. You'd think it's funny that I made Jade open them for me. We didn't have a boxcutter as we weren't expecting to find these around the attic, so she had to carefully use her pointer finger nail like a surgeon wielding a scalpel. I remember she got her nails done a few days prior, lilac and light blue flowers. Her hands shouldn’t have been shaking, but they were. 

In my head, there is an animal screaming and wailing, blood on the walls. I’ve never cried, except for that one time when you threw my lunchbox at the wall, and now, I am crying again. The lunchbox was shaped like a spaceship. I recall that I couldn’t eat for days because if it broke, that meant my food no longer had a home. I am constantly writing poetry about homes, you know. Whenever I try to write a poem about you, it always comes out like a poem about a home. That summer, I ran away for three weeks and couch surfed across Swansea. I don’t realize how much I care about you until I do, until my eyes are dark like park benches after midnight (the ones I slept on, when my friends couldn’t take me in), until my eyes match the insides of my stomach. That's the funny thing about a poem, I think. No one ever knows what you mean when you say things like that, like vomit or blood or the fullness of knowing what home means. No one can name the feeling of having a father.

I bought your dissertation because I couldn't find it on the internet. When I read it, all seventy-five pages, I couldn't help but think: no one reading this understands you the way I do. I wonder if that is what it feels like to write poetry as a non-poet. 

The closest I’ve been to taming that animal was finding your sweater in the back of my closet, holding it up to my chest and wondering if it could fit me. I can tell that you wanted me to have it, that you wanted me to remember you well by it. There are only two places this sweater exists, the depths of my closet and your university faculty page. To this day, there is a photo of you labeled Professor Emeritus in which you are wearing this red sweater over a red and blue flannel-patterned dress shirt. Imagine that I check that website routinely, obsessively, when I miss you. Imagine that I am afraid it will one day, like all things, disappear. Imagine that I have saved that photo on a hard drive and kept it locked away in my office desk, beside the scrapbook from seventh grade and the card from Mother's memorial service.

In the boxes, as well, Jade found a bottle of your cologne. It was brand new. I imagine you bought it for a conference, or maybe a date. I can assume she thought I would wear it, but I haven’t even considered it. Right now, I’m in bed searching for ways to discard glass without hurting myself and also without being selfish. I am so selfish, like physics textbooks littering a shelf no one has touched in years. I, too, have many bodies. I am constantly beside myself, in my own head, in a dream where I am sitting on the arm of the loveseat in your foyer. You are coming through the doorway, and the window has this sixties-textured stained glass that leaves shapes dancing along the floor. I hold my hand up to meet yours, long and slender fingers like skyscrapers. In this dream, I am too young to understand why you no longer wear your wedding band. I wonder if you sometimes picture me as a newborn.

In this dream, though, I could smell your cologne infiltrating my senses. I fell asleep on the couch with your sweater covering me like a blanket. It reminds me of what a strawberry field smells like: sweet, fragrant, and flawed Earth.