Go Forget Your Father
Author: Cathy Linh Che
1 BY CATHY LINH CHE
2
Because the birds sculpted
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the air with their song —
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I sent that flash across the sea.
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Candle in a paper lantern,
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the flame rose and dipped.
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•
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I’ve been hiding
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from my father.
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Fog-damp pall over the city.
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I ink this bruise onto paper.
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Years ago, in Highland Park,
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we’d picnic in the backyard.
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We slept in the living room.
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I clung to my beautiful mother.
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Flipped the pillow and pressed
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against its coolness.
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I held grudges like tiny fists of sand,
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then, let go.
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I kissed the fog and sky
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and the ocean’s cobalt hue.
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You.
I hadn’t yet met you.
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•
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Murky alphabet —
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I falter the letter, I elide the gaps.
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If the opalescent dew meant anything,
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it meant that one day
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I’d be lifted above my feelings.
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You’d become less than a feeling,
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the way every lover I’ve known
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no longer hurts me.
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Those old charges detonated.
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•
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Here and now, I make room for joy.
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Birds ribbon the air with their singing.
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Bird voices riot up.
The planes
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with their hulking engines —
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they fly too.
The jags of each cliff head —
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Your lips — I uninterrupt.
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I charley horse and miracle ride
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your absence.
The whipped froth of the ocean.
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Puddle of salt water, shivering wound.
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Seaweed, we sing of losses.
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Cold under this blanket, I wait
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for my alarm to sing.
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•
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I’ve polished this anger and now it’s a knife.
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I’m hardened as a hunter ornamenting his cave
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with the bones of the dead.
I’m so sick
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of history dragging behind me.
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Today, I don’t want to be sad.
But my father
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has retreated into silence and the lashes
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across his back have not healed,
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and my mother tells me he could have killed
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himself that night and we’d be blamed.
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Call the police, she said.
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We stood barefoot on the street, listening
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to him throw things
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against the garage walls, detonations
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of only what we could imagine.
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I hurl stones into the ether.
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I wash my hands in ink.
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The lost in the fog body borne of matter,
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history-less, untethered.
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Better to be alive and bewildered.
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At least I can name the thing.
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To love my father
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is to love his wounds.
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In times like these, we present our hurts
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like old toys we polish up
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to show each other
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who we used to be.
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