Editor’s Note: Because of the nature of the format of this prose, we have elected to post these words as four images instead of text. A transcription for accesiblity is included below.
Transcript:
I sniffed my sneakers once
Inhaled/their fresh scent into my lungs./Crisp from the box./I got caught./It’s the only time our relationship has ever felt
“normal.”/An interaction I’m well familiar with. A raised eyebrow, and a, “What the hell are you doing girl,” spread across his face and out popped a story. I’ll ask my sister to help me remember it/but I remember/he said he was living with his grandmother, and someone stole his shoes from the porch./A moment replays into infinity./And I/didn’t know her/and I’ll/never know/to what degree she knew me./Not her fault. Just time and/“Babes” to each of us.
I can’t seem to see/any birds/in their house.
I’m sure there was one somewhere/but I can’t seem to remember.
Pinched China Pottery/packed over from Jamaica to England to Florida
where it stays. Georgia too. Not even in the china figurine collections she kept. Maybe a Swan or two, but I don’t think so. I wonder why … Fishing for rainbow fish over stormy watered back canal./Grandad explains that his neighbors were never supposed to have a dock there. Against regulations. He wants us to build a house on the plot of land next door and I can understand. When you’ve got land, you’ve got to keep it. So they say.
It’s his home and he wants us to be able to come back to it even despite my dad’s prompting that maybe his grandchildren don’t want to live in Florida.
We don’t.
There is an aloe plant for her there and when she died I asked if I could take one back with me to Georgia. I remember my aunt saying, “At least that’s one thing you’ll have to remember her by.” Maybe I’m misremembering. Of course I am. It was harsher. Cockier. More British. And it died right after./The climates are different. Plants don’t migrate like birds do. They don’t have the wings for that (helicopter parachutes on the wind and dandelions in the breeze say otherwise)/Just like the mango seed/I planted from their fruit that never reached germination (molded black dew spreading to the dark spaces of a soaked paper towel) and the one that did — leafy green beauty wrapped in gold — but died upon my own migration to Chicago.
I refuse to let it go/thinking that maybe one day/it will grow back./It’s not that kind of plant./So it resides,/now corpsed/in my blue room/— its only light, artificial.
