‘Cause in a room with fizzing Coca-Cola ceilings, my grandmother lay
dying. ‘Cause this was about the time that my blue bear’s chest began
to split, spilling fluffed fiberfill out onto the sofa’s plastic
sheath. ‘Cause I was too young to understand why people cared
so damn much about virgin leather.
Everything in that house —
synthetic. Scotchgarded sofas. Scotchgarded souls.
‘Cause if something snips your heart out of its
cage too fast, or if the brindled burns of your
heritage twine together a million omens
every night, the sky seems speckled, you find
your feet turning into fins.
‘Cause no glorious Mayflower brought my family to another world,
just two boys on a 12-foot boat, one already dead.
Great-grandfather was hungry for life, he wanted to drink from that fabled fountain,
clung to mortality’s thinning threads with the fury and
fear of too many undried deaths.
This yearning churns through our veins, the pulsing power of inherited hope.
The doctors say my grandmother died of cancer.
They do not understand that it is
these dreams that are too much to hold in such crude vessels.
They live in the buzz of the AC and the click of the stove.
Flickers to the world,
but eternal fires to us.
