Poems by Ada Limón, Guest Contributor

Poem by Ada Limón, Guest Contributor

Ada Limón is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her latest book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was published in May 2022 by Milkweed Editions. She is the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States.

Ada Limón

How We See Each Other

I forget I am a woman walking alone and wave at a maroon car, assuming it’s a neighbor or a friend.

The car then circles the block and goes past me five times. One wave and five times the car circles. Strangers.

It is the early evening, the fireflies not yet out, I trick the hunting car by pretending to walk into

a different house. I am upset by this, but it is life, so I make dinner and listen to a terrible audio book on Latin American

Literature that’s so dull it’s Dove soap. Violence is done and history records it. Gold ruins us. Men ruin us.

That’s how the world was made, don’t you know?

A group of us, to tune out grief every week, are watching dance movies. Five women watching people leap and grind.

Every time I watch the films, I cry. Each week, even though we are hidden from each other by distance, I know

I am the first to break into tears. Something about the body moving freely, someone lifting them, or just the body

alone in movement, safe in the black expanse of stage. The body as rebellion, as defiance, as immune.

Aracelis writes to tell me she’s had a dream where I am in Oaxaca wearing a black dress covered with animals.

In her dream I am brushing and brushing my hair with a brush made out of animal hair. There is a large mirror and a room

full of books. History comes at us through the sheen of time.

I write back, Was it ominous or was it hopeful? She says, The word I am thinking of is “strong.”

I kindle the image in my body all day, the mirror, the brush, the animals, the vast space of the imagination,

the solid gaze of a woman who has witnessed me as unassailable, the clarity of her vision so clean I feel almost free.

Samantha Stokes

How to Cope with Sudden Disasters

Winner of the Editors’ Award in Prose

The condensation on the Modelo bottle wet my fingers. The glass almost slid and shattered. Because I was about to piss myself, I went to the bathroom. I was familiar with it—my favorite dive bar, outfitted with worn graffiti and three-dollar PBRs, always playing blues punk or something adjacent. The bathroom smelled like vomit, and so did I. I went back upstairs, and my seat had been occupied during my absence.

“Hey, that’s my seat.” I jutted a finger in the direction of the barstool.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the faceless patron muttered, “Do you want me to get up?”

He turned to me, and I noticed that he was attractive—not attractive enough to get nervous, but attractive enough to consider as a sexual prospect. I said, “No, it’s fine,” and dragged an empty stool next to him. It was a painfully conspicuous move, but he didn’t seem to mind. I nursed my fifth beer for twenty minutes before he spoke again.

“Are you here alone?”

I snorted. “I always am.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like.”

A sleeve of tattoos crawled up his arm and breathed into the fabric of his Bauhaus tee. He studied me for a moment, as if trying to place a vaguely familiar face.

“You come here often?” he finally said, returning his gaze to the kaleidoscope of bottles stacked behind the bar.

“Every night.”

“Really? What keeps you coming back?”

“Fits all the prerequisites: drinks are cheap, music’s good, bartenders are a little mean.”

He laughed and nodded. The opening notes of “You Make Me Sick” by Satan’s Rats whined over the speakers, and a couple bikergang-types at the end of the bar nodded their heads ever so slightly. They cracked jagged knuckles and twisted the yellowed bristles of their beards.

“I guess those are the most important prerequisites,” he said.

“Pretty much all you need in a bar.”

Inadvertently, I thought of him. It was one of those intrusive flashthoughts that comes on as quickly as it dissipates. I thought of him with his pointed chin, brown eyes freshly lit like kindling, and the warmth of his hands, so unlike the frost I’d become accustomed to recently. I hated that this memory made me want to order another beer, or have sex with anyone within a mile radius.

I didn’t cry at the funeral. Those dry eyes confused friends and family, and they hissed behind my back: does she not care? How do you move on, just like that? They’d snap their fingers to punctuate the just like that, and I’d beg for a single tear to appear at the corner of my eye like a diamond and slowly roll down my cheek, promising I hurt more inside than I could verbalize. And then I grew angry, because is there a proper way to emote grief? I’m still trying to be purple and blue all over, maybe just to prove to myself that I am sad, that I do care, but all I want to do is drink more and have sex.

The only insurance-covered therapist who was accepting new patients was a stern Catholic woman with sturdy calves, skin mottled by varicose veins. I was convinced she was made of leather, the crepe paper of her hands squeaking as she gripped her clipboard. I told her: I think I’m using sex as self-harm. She swallowed, and the gold cross hanging against her decolletage winked in the fluorescent lights. She asked if I’m using protection, and I said yes. She didn’t say much else. Instead, she asked how I’m “coping.” She eyed the skinny silver band on my finger, seven years worn. I twisted it around and around. It’s not that I hadn’t tried to take it off. Soap, water, lotion, and oil

couldn’t get the embrace of that fucking ring to release its grip. No, it haunted me like a promise of futures that have exhausted themselves and dissolved, or futures that are being lived out in some parallel universe—one where I’m happy and drinking Arnold Palmers, sitting out a summer storm with my daughter on our screen-in porch.

I’m coping fine. I’m going to AA. I’m doing my daily gratitude journal. I’m exercising weekly and taking magnesium and steaming broccoli. And these weren’t necessarily lies—I was healing in ways conducive to capitalist functionality. I was recuperating in ways that make me capable of occupying my quiet cubicle, fielding inimical calls and scribbling esoteric notes on pink Post-Its. But then I clocked out and hit the bars, alone as always, and every week I took home a small army of men, all overcompensating and equally mediocre. When it was done, I lay there with my head spinning, suddenly overcome with an apoplectic rage at the realization that I had no choice in my parents’ decision to bring me into the world.

What I didn’t tell my therapist is that I woke up every morning with a starchy mouth and briny headache, sure that someone or something was sitting on my chest and forcing the air out of my diaphragm. I didn’t tell her that every morning, I ignored the careful precipice of stained IKEA dishware teetering in my kitchen sink, pushed aside the single stick of butter and browned avocado occupying my fridge, and procured my first ice-cold Modelo of the day. I didn’t tell her that the amelioration of my depression seemed like something far-off and impossible to grasp, that I’d considered what my brains would look like splattered on the sides of the train tunnel, and that I’d been using anonymous video chatting websites just to have someone to talk to. I didn’t tell her that my grief was a wound I’d been trying to stitch over with the most sagacious medical integrity, but that these attempts had become almost farcical—here the wound splits, over and over and over. Here the raw skin shows, flesh and bone, that calcified sadness peeking out like some ivory harbinger of eternal longing. Here grief jellies and congeals around your flesh like adipocere, and you sink into the plush of your barstool, waiting for that parasitic infection to

eat away at you until you stiffen and rot, a tree gnawed at by some fungal plague. So I sat there, rotten and petrified, until my synapses were so fried I could sink into a beatific apathy.

“I’m guessing it’s been a rough day,” he continued when I didn’t respond. I glanced at him. Mop of curly auburn hair, hand molded to a beer can, weathered band tee.

“Do you eat pussy?” I asked. His mouth gaped, and I shrugged. “You’re not a regular. I doubt I’ll see you again. I don’t see the problem in being straight-up. We both know the reason you started talking to me.”

“So chivalry’s really dead then, huh?”

“I mean, why does anyone talk to a girl at a bar?”

“Because they want to get to know them?”

“Bullshit.” I shook my head, fidgeting with the lip of my beer. “That’s the kind of thing you save for dates or slow-burn romances with friends or co-workers. No one chatting up girls at a bar is looking for marriage.”

“Did I say I was?”

“It’s hard to believe any man starting up small talk is actually interested in what I have to say.” “That’s a bit pessimistic. You act like you’ve never made a new friend in a bar.”

“Sure I have. But I always end up fucking them.”

“Well, I’m not necessarily saying that’s out of the question.”

I let my mouth curl into a small, obliging smile. I readjusted my hair, realizing that it felt like straw and was probably cocooned in a halo of flyaways and split ends. I ran my fingers under my eyes, sure that my mascara had smeared into black bruises. I wondered if he noticed the cluster of pimples collecting at the corner of my lip.

“Too forward?” he asked.

“How could anything be too forward after what I asked you?”

“I guess that’s valid.”

“To be honest, I just got out of a long-term relationship.” I started to be honest then shivered and began to lie. “We lived in a flat in Dublin together, but I found out he was cheating. I just got back to the States a month ago. I’m still trying to readjust.”

“But you’d already consider yourself a regular here?”

I frowned. “When did I say that?”

“It was implied, I think. You recognized me as a non-regular.”

“Well, I haven’t been back long, but I come here so often, it feels like I may as well have been going here for the past couple years. I live nearby.”

“Me too.”

“Really? In Dimes Square?”

“A couple blocks off.”

“We might be neighbors.”

“Small world.”

We both drank in silence for a minute. I could see cogs turning in his brain, trying to re-initiate the ping-pong of rapport, come up with some quip to get us talking again.

“So, you just got out of something long-term, huh?”

“Yep. Seven years.”

“What a coincidence. Me too.”

“Really? Don’t tell me she was a cheater too.”

“No, actually,” he took a swig of beer and scratched his neck. “It’s sort of a long story.”

“You were the cheater?”

“Mm . . . A little more grim than that.”

“Are we playing a guessing game now?”

“Sure. How about a challenge: if you guess the reason for my relationship’s fateful end, I’ll buy you a shot?”

“Well, I’ve never been one to turn down free alcohol.” I tried to read his face: the small constellation of sunspots across the bridge of his nose; the hardened steel of his eyes. It was hard to imagine him as disloyal or abusive or anything other than the victim. Even with the sleeve of loud tattoos and the long, unruly hair, he had some quality that suggested a deeper unhappiness or betrayal. “Maybe she didn’t cheat, but she left you for someone else?”

“Not exactly.”

“How many guesses do I get?”

“I’ll give you two more.”

“High stakes.” I drummed my fingers on the bar. “Maybe . . . She’d decided you’d outgrown each other? That you were dragging her down? It was time to go your separate ways?”

He laughed. “Remember, I said something grim.”

I looked at him closely, considering my next words carefully. Finally, encouraged by the sleazy veil of alcohol, I released them. “Oh, c’mon man. Don’t tell me she died.”

The silence that followed punctuated the friendly confabulation we’d been entertaining, and instead, the belly of the conversation was distended by some sudden shift in tone—something that signaled an impending need for sympathy or commiseration. I felt my heart jump in my throat, wishing I could pluck my words out of the still air and swallow them.

“Bingo,” he said finally, avoiding my eyes, “Car accident.”

“Oh.” I felt like I’d been slapped in the face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah. The worst part is that she didn’t die in the accident. I actually thought she was okay; I was ecstatic. I had more physical injuries than her. But hers was internal. We didn’t catch it in time, and she hemorrhaged while I was asleep. When I woke up, her eyes were still open. It took me a minute to realize she wasn’t just staring at the ceiling, waiting for me to get up.”

I noticed he was slurring slightly, and the way the words suddenly came so uninhibited after that long, ruminative pause he’d let me stew in guiltily after my first words. It was like he’d been waiting for someone with which to share the burden of his pain. I stared at him in silence. My head pounded against my temples. and I finished my drink in one quick swallow. I wondered whether I needed to offer him physical comfort, maybe a hand on the shoulder, but ultimately decided it felt far too robotic. I wondered if he approached people at bars often just to recount this story; to have an anonymous shoulder to cry on. I’d done the same—not intentionally, but the alcohol would go to my head, and I’d find myself soliloquizing again, lingering on things that everyone thought I’d surmounted.

“Sorry,” he said, “I know that’s a lot.”

I had been hoping to get laid, and a profession of my own trauma felt like it might obliterate my chances of such a thing. But something about the storm that clouded his visage made me feel obligated to offer him the only comfort I could: alliance.

“Actually . . . Um.” I paused to flag down the bartender and order another beer. “I lied. Earlier. About the relationship.”

“Oh?”

“I was in a long-term one. We didn’t live in Dublin, though, and he didn’t cheat. He died too. A couple months ago. Alex.”

“Oh.” He thought for a second but eventually shrugged his shoulders, like my profession was too preposterous to respond to with any sort of social propriety. “She was Camelia.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“She was a pretty woman.”

“Do you want to tell me about her?”

“I guess.” He thought for a moment. “She was an elementary school teacher, which I think is the first thing I liked about her. She was this funny contradiction of a person: covered in tattoos, dark hair, blunt bangs, that whole vibe, but then children just loved her, and she was one of the sweetest people you’d ever meet. I remember her telling me about how the parents would be weird at parent-teacher conferences when they first met her, but by the end of the meeting she’d have won them over completely. People just trusted her. She designed clothes too; she was always buying stuff from thrift stores, like old curtains and blankets . . . She’d tear them up and resew them and make these weird sweaters and skirts that were a thousand times cooler than anything in my closet. I really saw myself spending the rest of my life with her. Our friends would always complain about their respective relationship problems, and we’d nod and offer our advice, but then we’d go back home and joke about how we were the worst people to ask, how we couldn’t relate to those ‘mere mortals.’”

We stared ahead. A weight should have been lifted from our

shoulders, but now the misery that hung around us felt even more acknowledged, larger than both of us, and somehow pathetic.

“Anyways, that was Camelia.” He glanced at me. “Would it be awful if I asked you how it happened? With Alex?”

“No.” I sighed. “I seem to bring it up all the time anyways.”

“Me too.”

“Well . . . Alex. He was beautiful too. I know it sounds corny or stereotypical or whatever, but he had these honey brown eyes that looked different in every light—sometimes muddy, sometimes amber. I was convinced I could read his emotions in them. He was a computer security expert, a white-hat hacker. He was incredibly, painfully smart. He built all his computers. And not just smart—he was cultured. Well-read. He would complain a lot about how he always felt that his coworkers were too left-brained . . . That they were scared by art or anything subjective, anything that left room for ambiguity. He had this incredible ability to be so scientific and so smart, but also had that open-minded languid nature of an artist. God . . .”

I felt tears start to sting the corners of my eyes. When it first happened, my eyes were chronically dry. Sometimes, I would sit in my room and marinate in the vocals of Elliott Smith or Jeff Buckley, waiting for my emotions to overflow and manifest physically. But now, months later, the tears came on all too easy and fast, spilling out in the aisles of grocery stores or during work meetings.

“He sounds like a great guy.”

“Yeah, he was. He got sick. He was pretty young—thirty-one . . . I guess he just got unlucky. Lymphoma. I mean, God—lymphoma, out of all things? It was fucking awful. I had to watch him until the very end. I had to roll him out of bed and change his diapers. It was so horrible. I know it sounds dumb, but I fucking broke down watching Benjamin Button because it felt like exactly what I went through, watching someone age backward, having to baby them when they were someone who you’d gotten used to leaning on. At that point, he was so skinny . . . He’d always been lanky, but then he was just bones and a hint of muscle tissue. He was so frail, I actually considered kill-

ing him. I loved him more than anything, but I just thought it would be easier for him, you know? I knew he didn’t want me to see him like that. He always looked embarrassed, and he hated when people came to visit. But I just couldn’t have his death on my hands, so instead, I sat by and watched him die . . . And when he did, it felt more like a relief than a loss. It’s finally hitting me as a loss, but at the time, I was just so glad he didn’t have to feel like that anymore. I actually smiled. His family would hate me even more if they knew that, but I fucking smiled.”

He nodded. “I don’t think that’s awful. Grief is weird. There’s no appropriate way to react.”

“That’s what I’m always telling myself. But I still wonder if I didn’t do enough. I’ll always wonder if I could have done more . . . I don’t know what, but more.”

“Oh, trust me, that question haunts me everyday. What if I’d just woken up in the middle of the night and checked on her? What if I’d had the doctors check her out more thoroughly after the accident? What if I wasn’t so focused on myself and my own injuries; what if I made the active effort to keep her alive? But I didn’t. We did the most we could.”

“I know. People have told me that a million times. But I don’t think I’ll ever truly believe it.”

“I mean, I don’t believe it now. But I have hope that I will, sometime in the future. I don’t want to resign myself to a life of self-flagellation, you know?”

“Yeah. No. You’re right. It just . . . It haunts me. I can’t even sleep alone anymore, or at least not sober. Otherwise, I’ll stay awake all night, staring at the ceiling and wondering whether God might come down and smite me for my negligence.”

“Wow. I thought that was just me.”

“Same.”

He paused for a minute, seeming to run his next words over his tongue a couple times before speaking.

“Would you want to . . . Sleep over tonight? Nothing sexual,

obviously. Just so we don’t have to be alone? And so we can be with someone who understands?”

The proposition seemed bizarre at first. A platonic sleepover between two traumatized people? At this age? I imagined sleeping with him, or near him, maybe with a pillow between us, talking and philosophizing into the witching hour, the way I used to with girls at middle school sleepovers. No tension, no ultimate promise of sex I would feel obligated to fulfill. Maybe it’s what I’d wanted all along.

At that point, I’d distanced myself from the few friends I had. My therapist called it “self-isolating.” I’d always been an introvert. For the most part, in my late twenties I leaned on Alex, who was the kind of person that could spark stimulating conversations with anyone around him. He was a great listener, a prolific writer, a debater, a questioner—I often wondered if there was anything he didn’t know. I also wondered why he’d ever chosen to settle down with me. But soon, the questioning gave way to appreciation, or some feeling of inexplicable luck, and I spent every morning running my fingers over the hills and valleys of his face. Without him, I realized how badly I needed him to break me out of my shell. I’d try to go out sober and would find myself wishing I was at home finishing whatever dog-eared and highlighted book I was halfway through. But even with my asocial tendencies, there was a part of me that needed a modicum of human comfort, a feeling of community.

I found that in bars. The alcohol liquidated my solid exterior, made the challenging topics I felt too stupid to comment on so easy to slip into, like a well-worn pair of shoes. Like my wedding ring. In a haze of imbibery, I could say anything. And it provided a community, too—that was something I was always scared to talk about in AA: the community of heavy drinkers. Many of us were bonded by an unspoken dissatisfaction, a mutual disappointment in ourselves and our lives, so we came together and drank, and if we ever saw each other outside the bar in daylight, we’d probably look down at our feet and walk by in silence. An invisible client confidentiality agreement.

But one thing that no one knew—not the bar regulars, or the bar-

tenders, or my therapist, or my AA group, or even the nameless man beside me—was that I was grieving for two people in one horrible catastrophe. We’d already named her: Daisy.

It seems ironic now, something about beautiful little fools. We should have known better. Alex’s cancer was progressing quickly, and by the point we’d learned the gender, he was always too lethargic and existentially anxious to have sex. I thought it might have quelled his unhappiness a bit: seeing my belly round out like a small, buoyant melon; that prenatal glow everyone always talks about. But instead, he got sicker, until he couldn’t even grasp the idea of the life growing inside of me; until he couldn’t even remember my name. After he died, I knew she could be nothing more than a memory of him. I knew I would hate her, no matter how badly I wanted to love her. She was bound to have his nose, or his eyes, or his warm, tender hands, and I’d always hate her for it. She had a deeper part of him that I would never have.

So I killed her. And to some extent, I killed him. It was a double homicide—one intentional, one not—and I was the sole survivor, living out both of their legacies in some sweaty bar with sweaty men, eking out a meager existence.The only excitement in my life hinged on whenever the next episode of The Bachelor was slated for.

“Yes,” I said abruptly. It came out like a burp. “Yes. I don’t want to go home alone. I really, really don’t want to go home alone.”

My nose stung, and I tried to control the faucet of thin mucus streaming toward my lip, but it was already flowing, and the man grabbed a cocktail napkin and waved it at me with his brow furrowed.

“Can I get your name?” he asked.

“Ainsley.”

“Ainsley. I’m Ezra.”

“Nice to meet you.” I held out my hand and laughed through the tears in the spirit of all the absurdity and sudden intimacy.

“It’s nice to meet you too. Do you want to get out of here?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

His apartment was small and unorganized, littered with books, fast food wrappers, and an assortment of half-melted candles.

“Sorry, it’s a mess,” he said, kicking at a labyrinth of books and crumpled newspapers at our feet.

“I don’t mind.” I shrugged off my coat and dropped it on the floor in a sad, wilted pile.

“Do you want a beer?”

“I guess so.”

He walked to the fridge, which was peppered with notes and photos and postcards sandwiched under magnets. I noticed a couple photos of him beaming with a lithe blonde woman, his hand tightly gripping her waist. I wondered if that was Camelia, but asking felt impossible.

I sat on the cracked leather couch, and he brought over a frosty Red Stripe. We sat together in the cloak of his flickering floor lamp and sipped with our eyes on the wall ahead, thinking of what had been tarnished and lost, all the inside jokes and fights and orgasms and road trips and meals we’d had with those now-voids of our previous lives. Things that had fallen between the wall and the couch, the itch on your back that your arms can’t physically reach. His hand slowly crawled toward mine, and I grabbed it without thinking. It felt good there, more calloused than Alex’s but still warm enough to remind me that I was sentient and had some life left to live. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back. Then, he twitched and suddenly withdrew it, slithering it back to his lap and dropping it to a flimsy open palm.

“Sorry,” he muttered, “It’s just . . . Do you think this is weird?”

“Two people who just met in a bar sitting on a couch, drinking beer, and quietly grieving? Yeah, it’s weird.” I laughed. “But just like you said, grief is weird. And so is everything. So are human relationships. So is sex and alcohol and therapy and lymphoma and random disasters. I don’t think we should feel guilty for wanting to find some comfort from all the weirdness.”

“Touché.” He sipped his beer. “I can’t remember the last time I felt . . . I don’t know, not weird?”

“Everything feels weird now, right?”

“Yeah . . . Like, unreal. I feel like there’s a degree between reality and me all the time. If something so awful can happen so suddenly, with no warning and no reason, who’s to say an asteroid won’t obliterate Earth right now? Or that Yellowstone won’t erupt, or a sinkhole won’t open up under my apartment? Disaster and death just feel like they’re two steps away every fucking second.”

“I know. And I guess that’s something I’ve always known, but I think finding your person is sort of what makes that feeling a little bit more bearable. It makes things feel a little less weird, or at least like good can come from the weirdness.”

“Yeah. Someone to laugh about everything with.”

“Right.”

It fell silent again, and I could see him tense up.His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed down a dry throat. He seemed to be parsing over a question in his mind, maybe wondering the most polite way to ask me to leave. I didn’t want him to see that I needed this desperately, that

his hand in mine felt safer and stronger than any of the empty, loveless sex I’d had in the past months.

“Is it okay if I pretend that you’re her?” he said obliquely, still facing the wall, so quietly I thought I might have imagined it.

“Camelia?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

In other contexts, with other people, this question might have been off-putting or pathetic or even a little creepy.But in the hereand-now, sinking closer together on the battered couch, hands doing a tentative dance around each other, it felt like the most natural thing he could have said.

“Is it okay if I pretend you’re him?”

He looked at me and nodded. He squeezed my hand again.

“Okay, Alex. I’m sorry I didn’t try harder.”

“You did everything you could.”

“God, that’s so reductive. What is everything? How can any hu-

man do everything? I’m sure there has to be something . . . Something I missed.”

“You’re a woman, not a deity. You can’t orchestrate medical miracles.”

“I feel like I should have been able to. For him. For you.”

“And I feel the same about you.”

“We’ll never see each other again.”

“And life goes on.”

“So it does.”

I laid my head in his lap, and he stroked my hair. It felt natural, like Alex stroking my hair. Like the little butterflies of Daisy’s kicks in my stomach. When his fingers hit a tangle, he gently combed it out. And so life goes on, and the tangles unravel.

We lie here together and pretend to be in love. In the morning, we’ll wake up and never see each other again. We’ll try to construct facsimiles of love and end up with simulacrums. Our wounds will split and heal again and again and again. A small part of us will always be missing, but at some point, we’ll learn there’s no benefit to the endless attempts to fill it. There are some things that can never be replaced. In the weirdness of the world, where there seems to be an endless stream of somethings to supplement other somethings, where cars drive themselves and cities look like densely-packed microchips, it will always seem silly that there’s nothing that can appropriately fill that small, irksome part of us. But from time to time, we’ll find someone to hold our hand and stroke our hair. It won’t necessarily detract from anything, and it won’t be conducive to any earth-shattering revelations, but it will promise us that we’re not alone.That our brains are better off in our heads than splattered on the sides of train tunnels, and that we’re more than the missing parts of our incomplete wholeness.

Natasha Segebre, The Pickup and Silhouettes

Lauren Stanzione

I Am Meant to Be Here

My mother is setting down the blue canister of flour. White bleeds into my sleeve as I sop up the dust I’ve spilled. She is smiling, and the light catches in her eyes—ones I always wished she gave to me: golden rings, flying blue saucers floating in peridot. Enigma eyes. This is like my mother, who in her own way has no secrets and many. Today, I am sitting around the island, our island of skeletons, and I am pulling her strings. I am opening her so she will tell me about the past, one I promised as a child I would write for her. She is telling me about the lump on her throat when we were one person. It was like a ghost, methodically pulling at the thin, delicate skin on her neck. It was a ghost, and I summoned it as it lay barren within her. I try not to think of the notes she would be able to sing if I could have derived from another place or time. My eyes are pulled to the red exclamation mark that hugs the skin of her throat, the specks of crimson against faint hues of tawny. Pain rolls through my esophagus when I think of the incision. I look away. My mother begins unfolding the story of the bump on her neck. She begins one along the outskirts of her mind. She is telling me about a waiting room, a placental hemorrhage, and a world where we both had fallen into the void; where I would have been a cell or two, and she would have left a baby and a man. Later, when I am lying in the safety of my childhood bed, I write down six words:

I AM MEANT TO BE HERE.