working on my SIP, brainstorming, remembering

B. A man’s war: Skënderbeu, Milošević  & Femi’s jade water

In China, where I spent the early years of my childhood, the fireworks blossomed out like roses in full red bloom, celebrating festivals, holidays, and, even once, Hong Kong’s return to the mainland after two centuries of British rule. In Kosovo, my home from age ten to fifteen, fireworks were scarce, as most things were—water, electricity, food, heat, doctors, teachers. But one thing we had in plenty: M16s. Even Pastor Femi had one leaned up behind his front door, in the room where we took off our shoes to visit around cups of çaj, pistachio wafers, rice pudding, Coca-Cola from glass bottles. The entire nation was armed to the teeth in the aftermath of the war. On New Year’s Even, while the rest of Europe celebrated with fireworks, all of Kosovo ran out into the streets, shrieking and firing guns into the air. My mother and I stood on our balcony beside the pile of wood she chopped each morning to heat our house, listening to the roar of automatic weapons across the city, humming like bees in their hive.

In the early years, when we lived in Ferizaj only months after the war’s end, farmers sent their cows and horses out onto their land to graze and to clear the landmines, watching their cattle blow sky high. All too often, children playing in the woods or fields found them instead. My family often hiked on Sunday afternoons in Gërmi, Kosovo’s national park that boasted a long, shallow swimming pool filled with emerald green water, a petting zoo consisting of goats and rabbits, and the city’s annual celebration of National Socialist Day. Along the paths we hiked, the sun dancing pale green through the leaves, every fourth or fifth tree trunk displayed an emphatic orange sign lettered with a warning against leaving the designated path and bearing the symbol of a mine exploding. 

In those days, from the time I was ten to the summer I turned fifteen, we lived in the capital city, Prishtinë. My mother and I often visited the Prishtinë plaza downtown by the theater and Nënë Tereza Street with its cappuccino shops and pizzerias, buying byrek from the bakeries and walking to the treg, the Albanian outdoor market that sold everything imaginable—gold Turkish coffee pots, batteries, bags of walnuts and red peppers, wedding lace, live chickens. After we finished our shopping, we often stopped in the plaza to sit on the broad steps, angled like an square amphitheater looking down toward a fierce bronze monument of a 15^th century Albanian war hero, Skënderbeu. Skënderbeu was a lord who successfully defended the Albanian people from the Ottomans, rallying an army that resisted the Ottomans for over two decades. In his day, he was famed for his bravery and nobility, so much so that Vivaldi even wrote an opera about his life. As a ten year old, I was enamoured of him. Every time we passed his statue, I felt the rush of a cheer rippling up from my toes and fighting to burst out. Sometimes I saluted; sometimes I talked to him almost like praying. I envisioned myself on a horse beside him, charging out across the Field of Blackbirds to face the Turks, brandishing my saber and howling.

If Skënderbeu was my hero, Milošević was my devil. I often passed by a certain fence near the parliament building whenever I rode the bus downtown. The fence was papered with hundreds of photographs of young people missing after the war, a protest organized by grieving parents frustrated with the government’s efforts to find their children. The photographs were posed, like the portraits American students take their senior year of high school. Their faces haunted me as I passed by. The war in Kosovo was a man’s war, led by Milošević and his armies against the Albanian people after their nationalistic Kosovo Liberation Army began to violently resist Milošević after enduring years of punishment and repression at his hands. It was a man’s war—fought by men, because of men, against men, men killing men—but I read the story of the war in the faces of the women and children I knew there, in the wrinkles of my nanny Tete Lumturije, in Riada’s sudden silences whenever any mention was made of those war torn years, in the innocent, smiling portraits outside parliament, and in the tears of the mothers making weekly pilgrimages to the fence to pray for their missing. Though the colours faded with the years, dark eyes bleached pale by the sun and weather, the memory of those rows of children remains as vivid as when I first saw them nine years ago.

Though the war was over, thousands of soldiers remained behind to keep the peace and lead the nation back toward stability. Despite their peaceful mission, military rule hardly made me feel safe. I remember standing on street corners for what seemed like ages, waiting as to cross over to the other side as mile-long military convoys barreled by. I remember waking up in the morning to find that the clay road we lived on had been torn up by tank treads, the ground churned up in two long trails. I remember the soldiers coming to shoot the packs of vicious strays that lived in our neighbourhood, jumping out of Hummers and mowing down dozens of dogs outside our front door and in our garden.

When I was twelve, far away in German boarding school, ethnic tensions agitated the people into conflict, and widespread violence broke out between Albanians and Serbs for the first time since the war. This time, though, the Kosovar anger extended to foreigners as well, as resentment had grown against the Western powers that still occupied the land. The tensions led to attacks, which led to riots, which led to a pogrom that raged across Prishtinë, burning United Nations trucks, targeting the NATO headquarters, and burning churches, symbols of Serbia’s Orthodoxy. When the Serbian armies burned houses during the war, soldiers often painted the sign of the cross on the rubble, and the Albanians retaliated during the pogrom with their own vengeful fire, lobbing Molotov cocktails into the churches near my house.

In the midst of the chaos, armed men broke into my house in the dark of the evening, ripping my three-year-old brother out of the bathtub and holding my mother at gunpoint downstairs, demanding money and valuables. My father wasn’t there. He was at church, holding a prayer service with Pastor Femi, praying for the peace of the city. My mother called him as soon as the men left, and he ran through the streets with riot police shooting at him as he broke through their ranks and raced toward our house, shouting the word “home” in every language he knew.

They shot our neighbour in the leg, the same neighbour who had framed the bullet holes in his wall after Serbian troops shot his Kosovo Liberation Army poster during the war, when they occupied both his house and ours. Our floors those five years were pocked and scarred with the marks of Serbian army-issue cleats. When Milošević died in prison, I was wracked with guilt. For years, I had wished for his death, and I felt the angels look down on me and cringe.

To be continued?

the presence of a father, the absence of a father

A. The presence of fathers, the fathers I had

My father followed a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, sometimes running out into the street in his pajamas to chase after it, or after something else he had lost. When we lived in Macedonia and I couldn’t sleep I often watched him from our balcony as he stormed up and down the sidewalks and muttered, looking to the left and to the right in search of it. We rarely saw the pillar ourselves, but we felt its wandering keenly as it dragged us from city to village to coasts, across seas and continents—never reaching the promised land. As a child, I had nightmares about being on a raft with my parents in the middle of the ocean, and as the raft drifted past different shores, my parents’ faces changed to match, becoming Chinese one moment and Indian the next, then Arab, then African. They stared at me with strange, dark eyes and forgot how to pronounce my name.

Beginning just after my sixth birthday, I lived apart from my family at boarding school, first on a tropical island seething with tender, deadly jellyfish in Malaysia and then later in a tiny village surrounded by apple orchards and vineyards in Germany. Our tan stucco house, with its chalet roof and flapping shutters, crumbled with each gust of wind that skipped across the cobblestones and thrilled our red geraniums, trembling on each windowsill. Leaves crunched under our feet as we walked home from school, collecting prickled horse chestnuts and peeling away the barbed shells to reveal a dark nut smooth as polished stone. Crossing the street and climbing the stone steps to the front door, jazz music beckoned us in, past the curving banister carved with clusters of grapes, and into the piano room where Mr. Jespersen played us home every afternoon. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, white-haired Canadian with biceps so big he couldn’t touch his shoulders and a voice so gentle you had to lean in close to hear him.

Mr. Jespersen was the type of man who buttered our breakfast toast for us in the mornings and heated hot chocolate on the woodstove for us on rainy days. He raised the twelve of us children, gathering us around his armchair each evening to hear him tell stories by the fire, exotic stories of jungle tribes and tigers and spears. He befriended the suspendered farmers who lived in our village, and the Italian man who owned the gelato shop, practicing his soft German on them and sharing apples from their orchards. He and his wife June raised us almost as their own, almost, while our parents served on the mission field in bleak and wild places. My own father lived in Kosovo at the time, just after the war ended when the United Nations bombed the Serbs out of the capital city.

My father was a preacher, the kind who hated weakness because he saw it in himself and couldn’t bear the sight. We left China because he wanted something harder, some higher mountain to conquer, and he wore the hills as his sleeves. When Dad preached, he dressed in blue jeans, a light blue collared shirt, a grey tweed blazer with leather elbow patches, and brown leather shoes, his preaching shoes. Every Sunday morning, he rose with the sun, ground coffee in his Turkish grinder and brewed it in his French press, and walked to church, which met in the back of a bookshop across from the bakery that sold loaves of crusty white bread for 60 pfennig. My sister and I helped set up the chairs as the singers practiced, a riotous roar of wails and tambourines. Crammed into the tiny room, the congregation fidgeted earnestly, listening to Dad speak, stopping at the end of every sentence to let Femi Cakolli, the Kosovar pastor of the Bashkësia Ungjillore Church, translate into Albanian. At the end of every sermon, Dad’s eyes filled with tears as he told us about grace, the kind that forgives every day and set us free forever, a message that struck home in Kosovo, a land coming out of five hundred years of oppression at the hands of the Ottomans and Serbs. The white-blossomed branches of peach and plum trees frosted the windows like doves nesting on the sills as the church received the benediction and brought out baklava, çaj, and pineapple soda. At night, he sang me that same benediction as a lullaby: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face shine upon you, and give you peace, and give you peace, and give you peace forever.”

During the school year, I lived in Germany with Mr. Jespersen, but at Christmas and during the summer, I lived in Prishtinë with my family in our house at the top of a hill surrounded by the clamour of mosques on all sides. One summer Sunday morning, Dad woke early to find that someone had broken into our front gate and stolen all our shoes from beside the door. Albanians never wore shoes inside, and packs of nomadic Roma gypsies were notorious in the area for petty theft. Young boys from their clan often climbed our green steel fence to steal pears and apricots from our landlord’s trees and their elderly sat on every street corner, begging. Rummaging through what was left, our bicycles still sitting on the stairs, Dad became still and pale with rage, a happening that was not unusual in our household but terrified me every time. It took us a moment to realize the most important theft—the gypsies stole his leather preaching shoes.

The next evening, we piled into our car, a massive white truck that was sometimes mistaken for an UNMIK official’s transport at the border and waved through the passport checkpoint, heading out to visit friends across town. As my sister and I buckled our seatbelts and my mom put my brothers in their car seats, Dad began to mutter to himself, staring across the street at three Roma boys, one of them sitting on an upended bucket as they waited for the bus. “Watching us,” he was saying, “waiting for us to leave, right there in the open, bold as anything. Just waiting…” Pulling away from our front door with my mother just barely in the car, Dad roared to life and gunned the car straight toward the three boys, making my breath catch in my chest, stabbing. His eyes darkened, and the car shot up onto the sidewalk, swiping the bucket as the three boys threw themselves backwards out of the truck’s path. Dad whipped the car back off the sidewalk and turned down the street, glaring obsidian at our shock, squinting at the boys in the rearview mirror as they picked each other up off the curb, unhurt. My mother was speechless.

I spent half of my childhood chasing after my father in his marches up and down the streets and across the face of the earth, and the other half throwing myself out of his path, tumbling onto the curb and away from his rage, praying that he would one day fill our home with jazz instead of fury.  

greyhounds

This is all I have so far in looking toward my trial start, and I can't figure out where to go. I see myself, the narrator, sitting on the bus contemplating the dullness many passengers seem to feel, the subdued living of the poor, deadened curiosities, the moment of travel and leaving one place for another, home, the present, looking out windows, the community of a bus, the nature of community as something you don't get to choose, being surprised by people once you're trapped on a bus with them for hours, letting yourself be open to learning about other people's hearts. And I have no idea which way I'm going to go, which avenue is calling my name loudest. I think I just need to sit in it, stew in it, and let things soak until I see a pattern appear. Some sort of arc. This is it so far:

A tattered red carpet, stained and fading to brown, splits Louisville’s Greyhound station down the center. It’s like Red Sea’s parting, except that the hordes of voyaging people stand to either side on the orange-flecked linoleum instead of walking down the middle. No one who rides the Greyhound is lavish enough to pay ten extra dollars for a red-carpet entrance and a few minutes’ head start onto the bus. The seats are all the same—worn, cramped, oily, the armrests crusted with chewing gum.

             The Greyhound route is the pilgrimage of the poor, a web of highways stretched thin between grey cities. Many passengers approach the Greyhound almost as if it were an underground tunnel, passing blindly through the darkness of sleep, night, and oblivion between stops. A handful of us—tattooed and pierced single moms jiggling their babies into a stupor, up and down, up and down, old men with bad backs and worn baseball caps, and college students like myself—keep our eyes open during the trip, watching for that moment when Tennessee becomes Kentucky and Kentucky rolls into Indiana. If you blink even for a moment and pass the welcome sign, it’ll slip by unseen; the change is subtle, miles of mountains becoming miles of hills and then fading away into the flat of the prairies. My dad used to say you could stand on a tin can and see all the way to Iowa on a clear day.

            Most passengers don’t look all the way out to Iowa’s horizon. Most don’t look out the windows at all. Maybe they’re burdened by the weight of things and grasp at sleep whenever they can, as life pauses in the hush of the bus. Some seem numbed by years of lackluster living, carrying dullness with them like their suitcases, heavy and drab.

babysitting

the world of five-year-old boys is so far from mine. not only is their speech all but unintelligible, when i do discover their meaning, it usually pertains to one of three things: food, toys, or poop. i love it. visiting the mcalvey's apartment is like stepping backward into my own childhood, rediscovering the energy, innocence, and curiosity i felt in 1996.

this afternoon, i allowed myself to be cheated at cards and to be swindled into distributing the contents of a box of nilla wafers even though i suspected they needed to remain closed and out of reach. i had socks stuffed in my mouth, balls kicked at my head, and even a firetruck came within inches of my face. i ate crackers and apple slices and drank out of a cup so small it felt like taking communion, but with red fruitlike juice instead of wine.

looking at the world through isaac's eyes, i rediscovered the ludicrousness of elephants and the ingenuity of a giraffe's neck. i was taken back to a world where boys could justify their inability to understand girls with one world: cooties. and i looked into a world so far removed from pain and heartbreak that death and bombs are matters treated like a game.

also, standing and bouncing a baby up and down for an hour really does turn into an aerobic exercise after a while. there need to be more kids on college campuses, like how therapy dogs visit the pediatric oncology wing at hospitals. not that i'm comparing kids to puppies... but you know what i mean.

andrew marvell

love as two parallel lines, never meeting, like stars in constellation, beautiful yet ever separated. andrew marvell, amidst a throng of lovers lamenting their celestial lauras and beatrices- your cynicism is refreshing.

when i was eighteen, i worked a few stops north of where i lived along the hudson train line. i also didn't have a car, so any time i wanted to travel out of the city, i took the greyhound. those two years in new york, i spent a lot of time on trains and busses.

one february night, i was coming home from work, sitting perched on the railing along the edge of my platform, huddled inside my long red coat with the black buttons. i was illuminated under a street lamp, the only bright spot in the darkening evening as a snowstorm blew toward the city. as i sat, shivering, with my hands crammed deep in my pockets, i felt myself watched. across the platform and the parallel tracks, a boy in a black sweatshirt sat on the railing across from me, under his own street lamp. he had his hood pulled up over head, shadowing over his eyes so that i couldn't tell where he was looking. yet somehow i felt them on me. we sat for close to twenty minutes, waiting for the next train, staring at each other across the gap, separated by tracks.

finally, he unfroze and raised his arm above his head as if to wave- but just as he moved, his train barreled into the station, slicing between us. i sat, still frozen, feeling as if the train had hit me. then, in its illuminated windows i saw him boarding the train and walking down the aisle until he found a seat in the second class car, a seat with a window directly across from me. turning to face me through the glass, he took off his hood so that i could see his eyes, smiled and waved. i waved back just as my train pulled into the station, and i boarded, sitting in the window across from his. we sat still and just smiled at each other as our trains pulled out of the station in opposite directions, he headed north and i returning south to my apartment. in the light of the trains, we looked like we came from opposite worlds- he was hispanic, dressed in a hoodie, sagging jeans, and chains, with a tattoo on his neck. i wore a red coat from france with pearl earrings barely visible under my curly, bobbed hair.

i can't make this sound as dramatic as it felt, movement and connection when the world was iced over with winter and dark. seeing each other's faces as we moved along parallel lines, side by side but never meeting.

one of those day

today was one of those foggy days. one of those days when there are no tables open at lunch and you spill on your favourite skirt. i watched dozens of people fall down the same ice-covered hill, knowing all the while that i would have to fall down it as well. it was the type of day that not only brought freezing rain that trapped us on the mountaintop, but the central heat also malfunctioned and set of the fire alarm, forcing everyone outside into the cold. sidewalks crowded with angry, shivering people.

i walked by one of my professors as she shook her fist and shouted at the sky, "if god is against us, who can be for us?" my thoughts exactly.

it's one of those days where no one is on your side.

it was a bad day. a dark day. a double dog dare day.
one of those days when your friends all start falling in love with each other, and you're in the library studying and missing out, drinking cold coffee and trying to ignore the boy to your left, humming to the music playing in his headphones. i ate pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

one of those days.

seventeen women raised me

there's nothing new under the sun. i've heard it a dozen times, but i'm not sure i fully understood it until we were assigned to write a memoir piece. i've heard a good deal of wry, disparaging comments about memoirs telling the tragic tale of a broken childhood, and so i'm afraid of telling a story about loss, which is my story. but if tragedy is what sells...

my life has been one long series of cliches: a longing for home inspired by the twenty different houses of my first twenty years. boarding school from 1997-2009. a childhood and family sacrificed on the altar of christian ministry. balkan wars. german villages. moving to new york and moving away again, cold and jaded. absent parents. suicide by hanging. falling in love at sixteen and reading poetry together, sitting in trees. encounters with genocide and refugees. rape. gangs. drive-by shootings. third world poverty. sarah lawrence. small  farming towns in the midwestern prairies. working for room & board on wyoming ranches. cathedrals. chinese kindergarten, where i was given a number instead of a name. number three. crying in front of my first chagall painting. red lipstick & floral thrifted dresses.

these symbols, images, and plots crowd the pages of every memoir out there. i feel like it's all been done, and always better than i could ever dream of doing it. i feel like the line i've been fed my whole life, "everyone's story is important and valuable," is suddenly being proven false. maybe i don't have anything new to say at all, and maybe i can't even figure out how to say old things in new ways.

saying old things in new ways. that's writing a classic. but classics require resolution, some moral or conclusion drawn from the story. and my story? it just feels muddled. it feels like everything is layered on top of itself until i don't know what's what, or what's ended, or what i've learned.

it's like lucy grealy said: truth is unretainable. maybe that's the moral of my story, that i keep learning the same lessons over and over, the paradoxical lessons of my own insignificance and of the father's unmitigated love. cherished. i learn about grace not only every year or every month, but every day. every morning i have to remember again that god's grace is relentless and all-encompassing. every morning, i discover myself and the world and god again. every morning when i wake up, i have to remember again that my father is gone, like he dies again every morning, and sometimes, before i open my eyes, i'm not sure what country i'm in.

i don't know how to write about these things without sounding pretentious or assuming. like maybe i don't have a right to write about hard things, like maybe i'll end up sound piteous. or maybe i don't have a right to write about the places i've been because i never fully belonged to any of them. how can i write about the ethnic cleansing in kosovo when i'm neither albanian nor serb? how can i write about china when i left at age eight? am i allowed to write about germany even though i'm losing my german, words fading out of my mind each day?

i do not belong anywhere. i've been everywhere, but never anywhere fully. i have half of everything, and therefore own nothing. can you put something down on paper if you do not possess it?

"the sun blooms, it is a geranium"

it's only january sixteenth and already my lists of things have spread from my calendar to my notebook to a piece of cardboard i found on the ground, and now they're begin to cross over one another so that all becomes illegible. in new york, a woman punched me in the street once, shrieking, "you're walking too slowly!" and yet i feel like i'm racing.

in germany, the shops close for the noon meal's mittagspause every day. they close by one o'clock on wednesday afternoons, for the midweek's rest, and they never open on sunday. in kosovo, we drank sweet caj with lemon every morning at eleven and and every evening at seven, the whole family along with our landlords, their children, and the grandparents.

my childhood meandered through three continents, speeding up only to catch trains as they pulled away from the station. but within a month of my eighteenth birthday, the second i stepped off a plane into new york city, the gun sounded. how can we live like this? finishing one sprint around the track only to turn around and run another?

we don't know when to stop, and i don't know how to end. is there ever an end? so many girls, their end is found in a man. others, they find their way back home. and i, i have nowhere to rest myself. i run from place to place, filling my pockets with new faces and losing them like children lose their teeth. there is no end in sight, only the eventual slowing of old age and toothlessness.

i will never have sweet caj in my garden of sunflowers and poppies in the morning and evening, invite the neighbours inside my gate, watch my grandchildren play.

"is there no great love, only tenderness?"
i know that i am racing, but toward what?

do or die

On the subject of gentrification: it's a strange beast. I had never really given gentrification much thought until I lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and then I was forced to give it a good deal of thought. Gentrification is a natural process, and a healthy one at that. I'm a firm believer in urban renewal and urban education as necessary tools for social justice and equality, and I've seen evidence of that in New York. In the past twenty years, Bed-Stuy's unofficial motto has been "Bed-Stuy, Do or Die," but through gentrification, the neighbourhood begun to be associated with murals, artists' collectives, and community gardens, and has thus achieved a much more positive image and much higher standard of living. But I found it difficult to reconcile the neighbourhood's improvement with my neighbours' bitterness toward the emerging population of young, white, college-educated artists. Through listening to conversations on the street and through being the object of frequent angry comments from passers-by, I felt like I witnessed the neighbourhood grieving the loss of their home. Bed-Stuy has such a rich history and a strong culture, evident even by reading the names of the shops on Nostrand Ave, from the Malcolm X bookstore and barbershop on my corner to Momma's Kitchen: Food for the Soul, located across the street.

Gentrification is a necessary, beautiful, and equalizing. It's a second chance for neighbourhoods to have new lives and reputations, for Bed-Stuy to host beautiful art instead of deadly turf wars. But I think it's wrong that so often the price of gentrification is the death of a culture, the crowding-out of one demographic to make way for another. Gentrification needs to celebrate culture instead of suffocating it, cultivate rather than amputate. That's the only way reconciliation can take place. Otherwise, it only increases marginalization and division. 

So I'm a big supporter both of gentrification and of its reform. Does that make sense? I love this mural from my street in Brooklyn. A lot of Banksy-esque street art and stencils were going up while I lived there, and they were beautiful, but I love how this mural really captures the feel of the neighbourhood. It's something to be proud of.

(914)

cousin paulie from connecticut hasn't called me in a while. he must be in his eighties, judging from the gravel in his voice. he calls every few months and asks for marjorie or pamela or nancy, always insisting that he needs to speak to his niece, and every few months i remind him that i am not his niece and that he has the wrong number. the conversation typically follows the same path, as he rifles through  the loose scraps of paper on his desk, looking for his niece's number and asking how the weather is in new york. 

there are a few strangers in my address book, but cousin paulie is my favourite by far. he is the only one that isn't automated, as most of the others try to cajole me into buying things or going on a cruise, typically beginning with a foghorn followed by, "welcome aboard, this is your captain speaking!" cousin paulie is the only one who laughs, which he does every time i tell him he's not actually my cousin and every time he replies that it's not his fault, he's been senile for a while now.

over the summer there was a thunderstorm that i slept through with my window wide open, and my phone was soaked all the way through, jittering and flashing the next morning as if a splinter of lightning had worked its way inside. cousin paulie doesn't have my new number, and every few months i wonder whether or not he's finally reached marjorie or nancy, and how the weather is in connecticut. 

traveling mercies

in kosovo, the oldest daughter assumes the blame and the youngest carries the tea, lemon sweet. when the chinese toast, they drink to the bottom before setting their glasses down. in brooklyn, a woman  stopped me in the street, saying, "stick 'em up, little girl, and gimme that coat!" it had white fur at the collar and cuffs, and it made me feel like i had money. she stood in my path and howled at the moon. i went home and put my head in an oven just to keep warm, because they threatened to turn off our heat if we didn't pay up, and all i had was the fur coat that i slept in when blankets weren't enough.

the ferry was free, so i spent the winters wrapped in that coat chugging out past lady liberty and back again, watching the gulls wheel around the deck. the ferry was free and safe. when our street flooded, when the heat went out, when our first landlord billy became a woman and refused to put doors on the house, when our second landlord mr. gold landed us in the squatters' court (he stole the deed from a lady named elaine), when our boyfriends were mugged, when michelle left for the insane asylum, when gregory bled out on our steps after a drive-by shooting, when the blizzard trapped the trains underground, when people on the platforms and streets had seizures all around me

the ferry was free and safe and my fur coat was warm. my sister brought me lemon sweet tea and i drank it to the bottom before i set down my glass.

january 10

forest fire. my sins and the sins of the fathers are my cage.

drowning like the white rats with their red eyes and aunt jean grimly dropping the trap into her bucket.

the riot police shot at my father as the church burned to the ground and my baby brother sat naked in the bathwater, listening to men break into our house.

mother’s day. seventeen women raised me, not counting margaret, ancient woman in the apartment below, cleansing detroit’s hymnals of jazz, wrinkled cheeks like baklava, paper thin, honey sweet.

my heart of jade, cleansed only by communion cups, my rudder tongue steering us toward another iceberg.

the wallpaper layered so thick that the room has shrunk to the size of a thimble. i sag with the weight of yesteryear while today papers over a new shade of coral and white, placid and teasing.

each creak of the rocking chair reminds of the next earthquake and the last earthquake and the whole history and future of earth fighting earth and tearing itself open.

i tremble beside my window, watching winter's redbirds hover over nothing but snow.

matchbox living

in the days after my dad died, hordes of relatives swarmed to our house and the world began to shrink, beginning with our living room. it was the size of their beer bellies, all crowded up against one another, making the room small and cramped, and it was the size of their voices as they bellowed condolences, crushing me against the walls.

i feel crowded today, like everything is ballooning and pressing against me until there's hardly a corner left, like the world has gone through the dryer and come out three sizes too small. it doesn't fit anymore.  i can't even get my head inside, with all the other things spilling out the brim, and all the balloons coming loose and flying away. everything is flying, the swarming relatives and the blackbirds both, and the balloons, translucent and pale as the sun blazes through them.

in the dormitories, the doors slam in steady rhythm as girls flow in and out of the halls like the morning tide. i wake to the pounding, the openings and closings, the valves of a steam engine or the velvet keys of a flute. surrounded by a skin of sound, i can't tear it away and leap into the silence. we are a machine, "the future is a machine with the mechanics of a dream," and i'm somewhere inside, caught on a cog or gear as metal munches beside me.

forty five cents

i read a story when i was younger
about a girl whose tongue fell out and
her father kept it
on his desk and used it
to stick letters closed.

no one likes the taste of
an envelope.