Index. To My Brother. Monozygotic. Rule 8.02(d) I Visit My Grammy During. Hurricane Sandy. Window to the Aviary. The Greenhouse

Transcription

1 Index Dimensions To My Brother Elementary Monozygotic Rule 8.02(d) pg.2 pg.3 pg.4 pg.5 pg.6 I Visit My Grammy During Hurricane Sandy Window to the Aviary The Greenhouse pg.7 pg.8 pg.9 1

2 Dimensions 2

3 To My Brother Fin, For everything that became a footnote In the months after you are born a crib is placed in my room. Your body like bird bones. You are shivering and I have claimed you as mine. I am caught covering you with a blanket and grandma twists my arm. I was only trying to help. 2 We are building an igloo in our front yard together so big we both fit inside of it. We are listening to jazz and eating hors d'oeuvres left alone at home for the first time without a babysitter. We are in our room where you find me masturbating and ask about it and I show you how. We are flowergirls at a wedding while we are still girls and you drop all the petals at once. Innocence in a rose pile. 3 There are pieces of you buried in every room of my body. In this one, I do not divide our shared room into sides by a line of stuffed animals. In this one, we are wearing matching footie pajamas and by the morning we are both in your twin sized bed. In this one, we do not fight over your nightlights and you do not have the nightmare about Scar from the Lion King. 4The beheaded is asked to become the executioner. He declines. To protect the person who hurts you is an exercise in empathy. To be jealous of someone s capacity for compassion is a sickening thing. Guilt is stuck between my teeth and I keep flossing but my mouth just ends up full of blood. 5 I make a menacing face with a demented smile to scare you every night while we are brushing our teeth. I bet my mouth looks like it is full of blood. 6 It is halloween and you are dressed as a princess. I am the devil. Maybe it is not halloween. 7 We are playing the floor is lava in the living room between dated floral couches. You fall in and I pretend not to notice. Oops. We keep playing. 8 I am teaching you how to do a cartwheel on a large rolled out sheet of brown paper. I outline where the hands go. Eventually, you follow. I wonder if we look like a carnival ride, all upside down and laughing, gaps between our teetering teeth. We keep tumbling but we get dizzy. We accumulate momentum and cannot stop. I want to stop I try to yell but my mouth is sticky with guilt. Your hands keep landing in my outlines. 3

4 Elementary Now it is that time of day where I am called out of class for twenty minutes, or thirty minutes, or an hour, I m not really sure. Time is an adjacent concern to the embarrassment I am convincing myself is excitement. Today we will play with legos, or the car game that is like tetris but somehow more frustrating and I can never win. Today we will play with silly putty or we will look at that oversized cardstock feelings chart on the wall that is yellowing at the corners and I will say I feel like the worms I pluck from the ground with the boys at recess, or I will say I feel like the boys at recess but I won t say that. When I walk home the boys at the bottom of my street will tell me I cannot ride a bike because I am a girl. This is all beside the point. We are here to talk about my fingers and what the boys will think of them. We are here because my hands are bleeding and this stale office is the closest thing we have to gauze. Today I will cheat at the car game or I will throw my legos across the room at that dumb grey fabric wall full of pictures from a National Geographic magazine and maybe we are not just here because of my nervous hands or maybe the beast that peels the skin off my fingers with his teeth until I bleed is now playing finger puppet with my whole body, or maybe we are here because I am playing with no one at recess but the worms. Either way I am excited. Either way I get to leave class and have a whole twenty minutes, or thirty minutes, or an hour just to me and Mrs. Biehl and my bloody fingers bitten raw and the face on the floppy feelings chart that looks angry but only at itself. Today I did not go to the principal s office for throwing a crayon at Miles or for throwing a chair at Allison or for throwing a tantrum. Today she will give me silly putty and I will go back to class and flaunt it like a first place prize. The worms will run out of my hands, slippery as humiliation, pale and red in the cheeks. 4

5 Monozygotic I wonder if you are still in that house in the yellowed photographs of absence, my fondest memory, tell me, sister, why they call it telepathy the way I speak to the dead. was that you? the goosebumps inside my body? how many of my cells belong to you? I hover over an image that predates us. your childhood it lingers in my hair; like a crushed mountain laurel a twin bed, half empty, the shadow you conjured by the stairs. do you know it hurt to become you? our rhythmic pounding reduced to one beat. 5

6 Rule 8.02(d) I am waiting for the knock of the baseball and preparing to flinch. Somewhere there is a bird and it is singing like this is a summer day to be enjoyed and so I am pretending. I am playing house with my father. In this game, because we are just playing, I am his son. In this game I am the heavy hitter on my little league team. We go out for ice cream and he tells me he is proud. I am trying to follow the rules. I am in our batting cage in the backyard and preparing to flinch. If I flinch my girlhood is showing. If I flinch I am no longer part of our game which means we are not getting ice cream which means he is not proud of me. There is a blue metal machine I think is the monster beneath my bed. It keeps spitting out balls and whirring the hum of a lullaby. It is looking at me square in the face across this dead expanse of white pebbles, keeps taunting the initials I carved in the concrete. My father tells me how to hold the bat and I try. My father tells me how to swing and I wonder if the trajectory will knock him out of the park. In this game, remember, I am his son and boys will be violent. Or boys will bloom into daughters caught flinching at the whim of the whirring machine. He is a good american dad, in his gardening sneakers and his blue jeans and baseball cap and the aggressive undertone of his voice. I am the bird and I am singing like this is a summer day to be enjoyed or I am dancing in the outfield. The whirring machine sends a ball at me and I flinch. It paints my thumbnail a bruised blue. 6

7 I Visit My Grammy During Hurricane Sandy manhattan closed its eyes for the first time/ & it was as delicate as watching a butterfly s wings quiver open/ manhattan took off its makeup and yawned/ i am not afraid of the dark in fact/ i am out to dinner with a man probably twenty-something years older/ he is a painter & isn t that romantic/ the busses have all sped away from the city/ like it is bleeding out but it s too dark to see/ the subways are coughing up wet lungs/ the city has taken a sick day & i/ am not afraid of being young & i am not afraid/ of how short my skirt is/ & i let him buy me dinner and feign ignorance/ or innocence but i know damn well/ manhattan is a string of crushed christmas lights/ in his palm & doesn t that seem dangerous/ & i have no way to get home but i am not/ afraid i have the stupid arrogance of a girl/ taught the currency of her body/ it pays for the cab ride back to grand central/ thank god i got lucky this time/ there were still trains running 7

8 Window to the Aviary 8

9 The Greenhouse We are in a greenhouse in the middle of the woods. There are trees drinking the breeze like a glass of iced tea and everything is the color of wildflowers. The greenhouse is built to grow turnips and we are walking all over them. It feels like walking over a graveyard except everything we trample is alive. Do you know who planted all of these in this greenhouse I ask but you are outside now. I call to you to come back in but I think the walls are soundproof. The greenhouse is surrounded by a rock wall on every side. We had to jump over it to come in. The turnips are clawing their way out of the ground and they are angry at us for trampling them. The woods fill with an ominous black smoke and we rush inside the delicate house so we do not suffocate. Everything is green inside and the turnips have formed an army but we cannot leave now because of the smoke outside which is swallowing the forest whole. It smells like spring and there is so much sunlight it hurts to look. The smoke is aggressively eating away at the tree canopy and I realize your pockets are heavy with rocks. Hasn t anyone told you not to throw rocks in a glass house I ask but you are already cornering the turnips. The windows are melting and I am trying to find something to patch all the holes. I realize the glass has been made of solidified honey all along and we are sticky with panic. The turnips have burrowed back into their homes underground. You tell me it will be safest if we stay here until the smoke clears. The wildflowers all suddenly quadruple in size and the smoke becomes a swarm of bees. The walls of the greenhouse fold upwards and the roof is re-formed. An entire garden blooms at our feet. I find a shovel which I did not notice was shaped like a key. I plant you with the turnips. Every bird flaps their wings all at once and it is a cacophony of heavy winter coats falling on the grass. All of the snow in the world melts at once. I shiver. 9