Scenes which remind me of your absence
pull at the seams of me. Carefully stitched patches
of healing fray. I am a sea of wetness—blood, tears,
spinal fluid—that you once swam. For you,
my flesh tore. My levees broke.
But this is not a love poem
any more than Katrina was a shower.
The first time skin became a panic room
that I could not coax a man out of,
I breathed for him. I cracked his ribs
trying to remind his heart its lines.
The door they opened into his throat
led to nowhere.
I am the child of three first responders. My blood
smells like a campfire, I was raised by people
haunted by their own ghost stories. One of them
ignores them, one of them plays house with them,
and the other one joined them. He walked right though
that door to nowhere, with cracked ribs and a
stage-frightened ticker.
His absence was a laceration
whose edges could not be approximated.
My last name is a scar.
They say when you put two violins in a room
together, that if you play the one, then the other
will sing back to it. But I am something more like
a cello: admittedly less delicate, and more burdensome.
Still, in spite of being tone deaf, I sang back to my father
in the best way that I could. When I first picked up,
it was because I wanted to know what it was
that he loved more than me.
When I finally put it back down, it was because
I’d finally learned that love had nothing
to do with it after all. Sometimes irony
isn’t all that funny.
I won the war they say, but I never came home
from it. It has been eight long years
of being a refugee in my hometown.
The person I used to be
is the old country.
Every gas fire is gunshots.
Every cookout is a hot metal firework,
a Roman candle aimed right at my spine—they say
that smell is the most powerful link we have
to memory. I don’t know shit about science, but I know
that sometimes cooking dinner tastes like Dormin.
I cook dinner anyway. I know that the way blood blooms
in a solution makes me understand sharks better.
I bloom anyway.
My blood, as it were, is a smoky siren
that I could only ignore for so long. My first language
is the sustainment of life. Sometimes something’s
gotta break to keep the show
going.
My second language is the firing of synapses,
my neurons reaching for one another
to weave together one cohesive tapestry
of everything I’ve seen: a world
like a beautiful mosaic,
even the pieces that
are broken.
- Cierra Lowe, 2021