You don’t insult your parents and you don’t tell them things that would frighten them. You visit every two months and stay in your dead brothers room even though it haunts you and you don’t care about the rats or mold or cockroaches or snakes or the way the bathroom sink doesn’t work or the  missing garage or anything and when you announce your pregnancy, you do it with pride. Ask your dad to name the baby. Ask your mom to give the middle name. There is no father and you have two cats and a small backyard and lots of friends and a nice fat savings account. There is no wedding and no husband and the likelihood there ever will be is decreasing.

 

You didn’t mean for this happen but you go through with it, being a daughter. Being stronger than the dread they bring me. Being wrong about some things but right about this. You finger the black cohosh and decide to name her something with some bark.

 

You remember everything. The intrusive thought: you only get pregnant once. The psychic asking who the little girl is. The psychic asking if you’ve ever had a miscarriage. The psychic asking about your  daughter. Finger the anise and name her with teeth. There’s the given names from your parents and then your special name for her; the thing that cuts its way out of you. The Name that called to you from the closet and half etched itself onto your tricep. Your secret name.

 

“You are my only daughter.” And then you fill the tub with the rose and lavender, and let your body soak. You’ve never been particularly decisive. And it’s not with malice decisions are made. There’s investment and aging and desirability. Financial strain. Your business to consider. You’ll be hung for this series and you write it anyway.  You are stronger than the way they judge you. You carve her name onto a stick and throw it in the cohosh tea. Drink the cohosh tea. Feel her drool hit your cheeks. The way you sang her name, the way you watched her take her first steps towards you and the way you beamed with pride, telling everyone of your goddaughter. The way she laughed and danced any time you turned on music. You only get pregnant once. Did you have a miscarriage? Who is the little girl?

 

 You’ve never been decisive. Be easy on yourself.  And do not fight the urge to scream when you first see the water turn pink. The way you rub your face into your cats fur and begin the long wail.  Let them down easy. Something about how not all pregnancies take. Did you have a miscarriage? Do not resist the urge to scream, red faced and reaching.  Touch your cats fur and now know the difference. You only get pregnant once.

 

“grief part 4”

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the people that say you can raise a daughter
on your own have never tried.

I am sure her chest cracked
leaving my grandmother
in pink fleece and white socks
on the porch of a house like
that, the way I am sure she
longed for him still, and
without a reminder.
later, she will pull
a light green pacifier from her
bathrobe
and tell a worried neighbor;
her, breath of bourbon
and donuts and her hair
falling out in clumps,
the way the neighbor cleaned
the shower drain,
in her native language asking
her if she had been babysitting.

the mother smart,
ripped it from the baby’s mouth
so she’d wail and the door
would open and they’d see her
swaddled on the bare concrete:
her only daughter,
chilled and panicked.

“Black cohosh (redone)” or “grief pt 5”

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I want to believe that good
things happen to good people;
the missing garage,
the missing shed,
the missing money.
I want to wave my hands over
my ancestral nothing
 to show them
they’re wrong.
I can’t shake the way a woman
abandoned my grandmother in a
Hungarian orphanage.
the way my mother told me
that was the way of the times,
the way I’ve been expected to thrive:
my grandma learning English as
she arrived,
my grandfather watching his mother committed
to a hospital, young,
signs of dementia,
his father running,
him only speaking Polish
upon arrival. I want to
believe that they knew
without language, simply
the first way they held each other
at night.

and I want to stop crying.
my friend says, they always come
back and I have evidence of it too.
I lost a hundred dollar bill
the other day and laughed.

it means nothing to me now.

 

“grief part 6”

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it’s all the same poem;
me losing something
and later,  not
remembering anything
as I fall into the dementia
and I think,
some things are hereditary
and some things are a wash
before they arrive.


I wish I would have saved
my dead dog’s hair brush,
my dead cat’s mouse,
some pictures of my friends,
my childhood house
before it crumbled from
the moisture, the squirrels,
the rats and us;
wish I saved anything to
do with us,
I think as I erase
our conversation.
when i’m old I want to be
confused about what shook me
most.

you end up counting pennies
at the end,
penurious again
wrapped in pewter
mansion.   you’re lost
in a giant house
with a giant yard
by a giant lake you
swear contains an alligator,
a few dogs and cats,
a room lined with books,
a nurse to remind you not
to eat your sweater
and dreams of sons,
or daughters if they’ll have
me, and us. trying to
remember us. 

“Grief part 7”

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I’ll remember you as a
long desire;
intangible, a
carnation sunset
leaking out of me.
And the keeling over
later, the aftershock:

cramp, the bite
in self preservation;
survival and the
slow repetition of
phrases cementing
the indelibility;
the dormant  rage in
prophecy.

you only get pregnant once.

then I become the squalling
daughter and you
become the thorn.

“Liliana” or “grief pt 8”

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Vision of me being young and asking for Lilith and at the shore the rocks and looking up at her and she was huge and growing taller. I was wearing the striped dress I always wore as a five year old and looked just like my five year old self . I saidI said I’m heartbroken and beckoned her to hold me with my mind like I always do.  I felt her surround me. I said rip my hands off rip them off and she was big and growing bigger and then the three of them were there: Hecate Lilith and Artemis like I pictured them so I could see them in visions. artenis.  being in all white as usual and Hecate being in all black. Artemis was the shortest. They were on the rocks just out of my reach deliberating over my preparedness. Hecate said “maybe it is time, she has been devout” then suddenly We are on the cliff, they said they were going to push me to make it easier. I said no I have to jump or it doesn’t count that’s what you said; then i face the ocean and the cliff became even taller, so tall it was implausible and I had to land between the three rocks. I fell deep in the water and kept going further and further. there was nothing in the water. No animals, just black water and I could feel myself floating. Lilith said nothing, notice there’s nothing. There was a mirror on the bottom and Lilith told me to look in it. I saw myself five years old and then a sea lion mouth open behind me then she said let the shark eat you and I let the shark eat me and he took me somewhere and spit me out.His stomach was cold and full of water but there was nothing ominous.

She said this is the bottom and I fell upwards again and was back on the island w the man in the red and white and this time his trbe attacked me. I said forgive me show me mercy and he said mercy? I was on a pyre. One of the women was hovering over me, the same one that helped me before. I thought the man was another person based on an old reading I had received, an old lover that I harmed in a past life and began to apologize for an old transgression never made clear and saw myself  stabbing him in the neck, in the front, the blood gushing:
I promised him i would never see him again in any life ever. Our paths will never cross. I waved my hands in front of his eyes and a very mild fog appeared, and then I was taken to the warehouse except it was empty then a stage just for me that first had someone singing then quickly cut to a projection that  said never gonna happen.  then I ran through a field in the city that Had two deer with glowing eyes and then back underwater. I felt the need to jump again and then back to the island where he was there. I said I told you i’d never see you again. Why are you here? He had blue eyes was very dark and thin wearing black garb. a black tunic.  We were the same height His skin and garb matched but his eyes were blue.  He was older in His seventies, He said maybe I’m not redacted. I said then who are you?
 He said I’m  elegua. we are your ancestors
The twenty minute nap on the plane and the first male god to ever present himself to me and consistently
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“Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.”

—ocean vuong

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“A strong woman whose strength is her solitude,  a weak woman pierced by visionary raptures, those are my mothers.”

 

–ursula le guin, searoad

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all day long
I vacillate between intention,
maybe a couple steps forward
or skirting one craving
and then the immediate withdrawal,
the later three walks and
four coffees, twelve cookies
and picking a fight;
my habits,
 my beloved
hermeticism and the double meaning of
everything and I’m
ambivalent about every choice
I’ve given myself over to;
even in completion,
I shrug.
let the wind take me.

now I am
in Philadelphia,
applying for an Access card,
going on interviews at spas
and also scrounging social
service work not sure if I can face
it again.
writing letters to an old client,
lying saying I got into Temple’s
education program and I’m
raising my hand in meetings
to volunteer for service.
getting invited to social things.
crying endlessly and in public,
which refreshes me.


I am dog sitting; house sitting for
money in Queen Village,
and I spend the days
drinking their coffee
and sneaking their chocolates.
using their washer for my own
heavy blankets,
and walking the pit bull
without the choke chain
she gave me.
not trying to make a fuss
about it even though I want
to put it around her,
walk her on her fours and
then tug a little bit.
instead I
observe the doors of people
in Society Hill: clean black or
mahogany with the numbers painted on
them or in brass next to their
outdoor lanterns, their empty
flower boxes soon to be leaking
zinnias, petunias, geraniums.
and
heavy doors.
strong wood.

this reminds me of the time
I was being driven around an
area of DC I didn’t recognize.
we had weaved through Georgetown and
then I noticed these houses towering over
me, gargantuan and white and
lawns that you could roll down.
I asked the driver what neighborhood
we were in and he flatly said,
this is a rich ass neighborhood.
this is where the super rich pentagon people
live and I said
we should rob them.

I begin to circle the area
with the pit bull.

“Spring Valley” 

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