Ice

and i guess, at the end of it all, i was a snowflake that fell onto your coat, sunk into the wool, and dried there.

Still Water

you are river water that smells like fish.

you are mildew that grows on canoes.

today i looked through my closet,

and found your things, the things i kept that

smelled like you.

today i saw how fluid we were, or how fluid everything is,

or just how quickly we go from white rapids

to still water. and i am a fish

who feeds at the bottom

of our nostalgia.

i pucker my lips, i flutter my gills.

i have spent months running away from you,

but today i wanted to smell you,

so i smelled the things that smell like you,

and you smelled sterile,

like cloth.

Hot Water

You know when you are running water for a bath, hot hot water, and you have your hand in the stream, and it becomes so hot that it is almost cold against your skin? And how ice can be so cold that it burns, like frost bite, how it starts to feel like fire? That is how I've felt about you lately. I thought about your feet, the way you dance down the stairs, and the water was so hot that it blistered. Please don't cry when I tell you I have hated you lately. It's just really hot water. Unbearably hot water.

Sarah Goldfarb

I wasn’t always like this. I wasn’t always so frumpy and fragile. I had a man who looked at me, looked real deep into me, like I was more than a washed-up reject from the baby boomer generation. I was a budding and beautiful, intellectually sound, and well-lived young girl with excellent social skills and a broad street knowledge that peaked my practical intelligence at close to genius, at least in the sense that I could navigate my way around any city, and I knew and had been to each Great Lake, and had memorized both the New York and Chicago subway systems, and that I had tasted almost every unique cultural delicacy within the continental United States. This all made me a terribly well rounded individual, almost annoyingly so I’m sure, and also an ideal candidate for a number of men. But after years there has been so much baggage piled on my shoulders that I barely stand up straight anymore. I’m a waning moon, five feet and four inches of dilapidated spirit and rusting skin. I have cauliflower hair and wrinkled lips, a belly that hangs off of me, and varicose veins. I spend every day sitting sadly on this old recliner. It smells like cigarettes and makes my thighs itch through my nightgowns.

On cold nights like these I hide in my mattress, by the window, tracing the city with my fingertips. The lights from the planes fly over the lake and I imagine them plummeting into the buildings and crashing through the Sears Tower. Those images will never leave my mind alone. I sit cross-legged, picking at my cuticle beds and sometimes I can even hear the engines squeal and some of the passengers weep. I sleep to the sound of their panic. It’s not that I take pleasure in their tragedy, it’s just that I wouldn’t dare miss my next interview opportunity. I want to be involved in this world event, to sit in a CBS news chair and talk about the trauma of watching smoke climb the skyline from six miles away. I imagine I’d have a better view from navy pier, where the city looks serene and invincible, where they spin spools of cotton candy and children lick the sugar from their fingertips. Wouldn’t the silence be devastating? Or from the beach! It would be such a strange view from the beach outside my window, four blocks down the road, the one that reminds me of an old wooden puzzle I did over and over again my mother’s basement. It had two sides to every piece, one in which the beach was full of people and pets, kids splashing in water, burying each other in sand, mothers lotioning their backs, and one side where it was barren. I imagine when the plane hit that the people would flee and kick up sand with their feet and all of their umbrellas would sit alone by the water. I would see it all from my bedroom, the pieces slowly turning over until the beach just had footprints and seagulls. Do they interview the seagulls? I’d like to be a seagull who hovers on the lake as the buildings burn, hungry and ignorant, just kind of floating majestically on the water, catching fish in its beak.

Darling, I'm the Berlin Wall

Oh darling, didn’t anyone tell you? I am the Berlin Wall. I am twelve majestic feet of concrete and barbed wire. I am graffitied and broken. I rust in the rain. I am cold and compact. I am eighty-seven files of tightly wound fencing, separating my East from the world’s West. Darling, I’m a concrete compactor. My heart is chained inside of me like a magician performing a trick, imagine a heart restrained in tight wire and locks, mesh fencing and steel cages, sinking into saltwater, that is me, my heart is a failing magician, trapped so deeply inside my trick that it has begun to drown. My hesitance is killing me, dear. Didn’t anyone tell you? Didn’t anyone warn you about my walls and my silence? I am sorry I don’t speak. I’ve been trying with you, I am trying. I’m terrified that if I don’t teach myself to talk in these moments, I’ll become silent and grow old in rooms full of the pages of my day-to-day conversations, trunks of books I’ve written over until my feelings are illegible, that we’ll have to lay in painted sheets, the words I can’t say bleached into the fabric, gnawed into the walls, sketched across your forehead and carved into your teeth. Why can I only ever write and never say? I am scared I’ll become even heavier, even stronger, that the Germans will rebuild and reinforce me, that I will solder and rust in the rain until I’m impenetrable.

Please, darling, I hope you live to see me crumble. I want to melt and smolder, I want to hear the demons scream within me, their black eyes burst, I want to stand with you and watch them incinerate. I am so scared that if I don’t start to speak you won’t want to adapt anymore to my silence, that all of the pages will be too much for you handle. What if my voice is the reason you love me? I am scared that the silence will literally be deafening and you will hate me when you lose your hearing from never using your ears. After all, isn’t that why bats are blind?

Oh, love, I’m so sorry. I wish I had found the match before I met you. I wish it all could have escaped me. I am a splintering rope and your hands are too soft to risk the blisters, your mind too nimble, too young to be slowed by the debilitating climb. Oh, don’t you dare slice up those pretty fingers. I’m sorry, I am working on falling. I have tried bulldozers and dynamite. But I am plexi-glass, I am bullet-proof vests.

Darling, I have so much to say to you, but it comes out in whispers and hums. I want to say that if I had the choice I would stay laying next to you until I had no option but to move, that I wouldn’t mind melting into you, that the other side of me never begs me to turn over, and that if it did I would stay in that position until the other side of blistered and scarred, that it wouldn’t matter because no one would ever need to see that half of me, that I could learn to walk with our legs molded together, that I wouldn’t mind the stares.

Let me under the blanket, darling, I want to feel the weight of you, I want to sweat against you, and the cotton, the polyester, the woven fibers of your security. I will soak in it. I will spend days listening to your past. I can sit cross-legged listening until my legs became numb, and when you need me gone I can camouflage myself into the grass and the lampshades, squeeze myself beneath the tiles and between the blinds, I can slow my breathing, I can hold my heart.

I am sorry, I should have told you, I should have tried. I don’t want you to hurt your hands breaking me. In time, the crowds will chip away at me. But don’t spend your life waiting, darling, you’re too graceful, you’re too kind.

Boat People

With her head resting against steel, she wondered if they cook rice in America, and whether she had remembered her good wood paddle, the one Danh gave her before peace ended in Saigon. She thought about sautéed white fish and the houses she could buy with the gold she had stashed in her robes, and in her ears, and sectioned between her teeth. She would be the wife of King Midas; she would sip gold-specked vodka and bathe in water that steamed like chimneys. She crossed her legs and held her knees so only the sides of her heels touched the scalding steel. Her hands held her belly as if to keep her child from fleeing the womb, the warmth in her palms encouraging him to stay for two months longer, just until it's safe ban than, please just stay until this boat hits the California coast and you can feel the weight of her liberty.

The boat was an uncomfortable flirtation of wood and steel, its base like a wicker basket with a few metal benches sandwiched in the weaving like pins. Above the pins lay heavy wood beams, like lumber, piled with twine. It was a hurried mess of bodies, each heavy with their own desperation.

Underneath the lumber, her body swayed with the tattered sails. As the boat ebbed in the tide the bodies of the immigrants soon piled like anchovies, their skin rough like scales, but without gills their chests nearly drowned in the churning saltwater. But it cooled their burning feet and so they bathed in it, opened their mouths to drink it, held out canteens to collect it and pour it on their children’s tongues. She sat still under a splintering beam, still cupping her stomach, whispering Hail Mary's and watching their faces turn ocean blue, their black hair like seaweed riding the surface of the water. She stared, her voice rising in prayer, letting God hear her words over the moaning. The sound was silence next to the curdling screams of bullets in backs, the pressing of grass into earth as the women fled, clutching their breasts, stampeding like boars. And so she crossed her forehead, then her lips, then her chest, and closed her eyes.

When she woke the sun had turned her skin the color of boiled lobsters, her nails growing into claws. She curled her toes and held her knees with callused hands. The fishing captain had picked up a few refugees he found bobbing unconscious, the cargo count now near two hundred. She watched the officers drag their bodies out of the water and into the boat. She imagined the squeaking of skin and steel, like the sound of hungry swans, and continued her letter.

To My Unborn Child: Please always remember to listen, and don’t you dare go deaf. When you leave me you will hear gasping and tears, shallow breaths and subtle screams. You’ll hear rubber and linoleum, cotton and concrete. Look at the sky and listen to the buzz of vapor against vapor, the static created in the clouds. Listen to figs fall, to the squealing of engine and asphalt, to the Americans walking in herds.

She had written three pages and used the paper to cushion her head from the splintering wood, to wrap the wounds of the immigrant children, the frayed edges perfect for dabbing at the lesions, its fibers sucking on the blood like leeches, her words protecting and healing contusions, ink stamped to their skin from their sweat. She was terrified that when the boat ran out of rice she would have to eat the pages, at least to satiate her stomach and her child, to give him something to feed on. She thought about which pages she’d chew on first, which words were least necessary, what he could and couldn’t live without reading. She held her rosary and prayed that the words might soak into him through the umbilical cord, that he might lie in the placenta of her wisdom and absorb her love through his reticulum.

She refocused her eyes to a boy staring into her, seemingly sobbing, touching his hand to his stomach, to his mouth, to his stomach, to his mouth. She wanted to say, I’m sorry, I have no food, I can give you gold, give me a few minutes, let me chip it from my teeth, I will give you enough gold to buy the world’s worth of pickled jicama and beef, cilantro and jasmine rice, you can build a restaurant and sell your meat, but no man on that boat would dare trade rice or water for gold, so she just laid there, shaking her head, apologizing with her eyes.

The crowd in the cargo haul loosened when bodies fell unconscious and the officers deemed them dead and fed them to the fish. Some people without children jumped. She looked at them in haste, a bitter jealousy, how lucky you are to end it so easily. They were told it’d be weeks more until they found the harbor, that the United Nations had sent boats of stripped grain and dried meat, but the pirates of Thailand had so far seized every ship, and so the refugees went hungry. I’ll eat the seventh page first. Then the fifth and then the first. Listen to oil as it sizzles in woks. Listen to shooting stars.

The crowd had cleared so that the air thinned enough so she could breathe without swallowing the humidity. She watched her chest swell and deflate, her breasts rising and falling, like the rise and fall of the Roman Empire. She watched Augustus march across her chest, leading an army of thousands, like ants crawling, or maybe they were ants, a colony growing to an empire, some receding into catacombs, others pushing forward with their shields.

A dark man placed a straw broom on her belly, pushing the insects to the floor. He spoke to her but she just looked at him blankly, her eyes barely able to focus, her hands tightly gripping her abdomen. He spoke louder and she covered her ears and moved one hand to her lips. His brows furrowed and the light skin above his lips wrinkled.

He put himself to his knees, reached for her notebook and wrote:

Vous semblez triste.

I don’t speak French.

I didn’t want the bugs to bury their eggs in your skin.

You destroyed the Romans.

I’m sorry.

She clenched her rosary and let the dark man share her shade, a piece of the steel that stayed cool, in the shadow of the sails, for only three hours in early morning. He sifted through her book, found enough room on a page and wrote:

My wife died two weeks ago in our kitchen. She was cooking rice in a nice robe and singing, singing beautiful songs like a tuy quy bird, until the room engulfed with flames from the bomb. I had to watch her body fall and her hair melt into her skin. I had to watch her blood soak into the grain. It was the color of salmon.

I’m sorry.

I’m not running from war. I just couldn’t stand to be where she was supposed to be and wasn’t.

Where are you going?

I don’t know.

I was raped by a soldier six months ago, when my family was running from Hanoi. My father left me and took my sister under his shirt to the South. I’m scared that this baby is the only thing left of my family and maybe me. I want to bring him to safety. I want to see what he looks like. I can’t even guess, I was blindfolded. I don’t know if he was white or Viet Cong. All I know is that’s when I went deaf. I couldn’t stand to hear him moan.

I’m sorry.

The steel was hot again, their skin beginning to blister from the burns, hardening like the backs of crustaceans. He let her lay on top of him to keep her belly safe from the sweltering heat. She felt his bones breaking beneath her, or maybe it was his teeth grinding and some disintegrating, or maybe it was the knuckles of the children cracking. She lay still with her head on his chest, and thought about the fifth page. Listen to chests when they throb. Listen to toes climbing ankles, to fingernails flirting with scalps. Or the sixth. Listen to bugs burn against light bulbs. Listen to their bodies smolder. They took turns letting each other break from the heat, sometimes she’d let him stand on the paper and lean on her shoulders, her words cooling the balls of his feet, embracing his kin and seeping into his pores. When the sun fell it took hours for the steel to cool, but when it did they found room to lay next to each other, cold from the harshness of the wind against their sweat, they shivered and shared a small cloth to wrap themselves in, like wet rice paper. He wrote in the corner of a page:

I’ve never loved anything as much as I loved her. It was the way she moved. It was her lips when they parted to speak. It was the plumpness of her cheeks.

I’m sorry.

Your cheeks are plump like hers. Your eyes are wide like fish.

I will keep them closed and wear a cloth over my face.

No, please keep them open.

I’m sorry.

They slept to the sound of babies climbing netting on the sides of the boat, their frail bodies instinctively climbing for air, opening their mouths for rain. Their bodies embraced while mothers tried to lift their tired arms toward their children, shaking the netting and screaming, please con trai, come down from the ropes. The boat ebbed in the sadness of their hallow bones, the frailty of their faith, the torment in their babies’ brown eyes. It was the soundtrack to their embrace, the sound of eyelids closing, of hearts struggling to beat. He nestled his head into Listen to the sirens scream. She groaned.

In the morning when the steel was hot again, she moved herself slowly on top of him. The boat tipped at the embrace of a wave and her eyes could not focus. She watched her rosary sway in her bosom, sweat and stone, as the boat tried desperately to resurface and coast along the crest. It was a pendulum ticking like a clock; it was the seconds between breaths, the minutes, maybe the hours she had left to live. It slowed as her eyelids quickly dropped and then crawled open. She saw the veins in her eyes reflect against her skin, reds of raw flank, purples of her mother’s robes. She thought of what she’d say to God. I’m sorry, I should have tried harder. I should have found food. I am so selfish, I’ve left my child without a home, without a mother. I should have eaten the letter, I should have tried to survive, I could have sacrificed something. Anything. I am the product of shame. She thought about the lightness of Heaven and the darkness of Hell. Soon her deafness would be met with blindness. She’d be deaf and blind and dumb. She’d be dead.

Her eyes twitched and she felt the darkness of Hell. She looked into the eyes of the Devil, his pupils black and bursting with angst. She watched them curdle and churn, spark and occasionally flame, white lines exploding on black. His face sweated as he stared into her and his throat expelled guttural screams.

The man beneath her calmly woke and cupped his hands over her eyes. She felt the warmth of his hands but could not move. He moved his fingers into hers but they just lay like the dead arms of an octopus. He panicked, pushing her carefully to the floor and trying to pry her fish eyes back open. Her lips were chaffing and swollen, her teeth brittle and her tongue dry. He tried again with his hands, pushing on her eyes with his thumbs, his finger prints pressed into her skin like the trunks of old trees. He cupped her rosary with one hand and prayed, please I cannot watch another woman die. He put his lips to hers and breathed, pumping her chest between breaths. She felt the weight of him, his hand like a tire rolling over her, and her eyes opened.

The Devil’s eyes had become dark clouds, his screaming now thunder, his sweat droplets of rain. Her eyes flickered and focused, the rain falling harder and louder. They climbed to their feet and lifted their mouths to the sky, their knees callused and bent, their throats dry, their tongues anxiously waiting. The water tasted sweet, like che, red beans and coconut milk, wetting their tongues and sliding down their throats in waves. She watched the panic in the eyes of the other refugees, the chaos ensue among them. They trampled each other, reaching for anything to catch the rain, buckets and bags, satchels, the mouths of the dead. Children would put their hands into the open jaws of the dead and cup the water to their mouths, splash it on their burning scalps. Some of them danced or cried, screamed and crossed their chests. Rain collected in wicker baskets but most of it fell through holes in thee weaving, wetting the steel and soaking the ropes. She watched people turn over their paddy hats, using them as sinks to bathe their babies and wash their wounds. But she and the dark man simply knelt there, eyes towards the Heavens, letting the water soak into their parched bones. The hot rain soaked a few bags of dry grain, wetting the rice until it expanded and burst the brown paper. He ran through the crowd and scooped as much rice as he could fit into his arms; he rested some on his feet and in her hair, and balanced it on her small shoulders. She tucked her letter in a straw mat, and then a cloth, and then a satchel, and underneath a bench. She watched the water soak into the skin on her belly, its hands reaching to her womb. Listen to people breathing, their chests rising and falling, listen to them talk and scream, to them whisper and cry. Listen to their phlegm gurgle. Listen to them stumble, to them giggle, to them sing. Listen to their toes crack and their eyelids twitch. Listen to peace and listen to war. These are the sounds of survival.