Ars Biologica
Forgive me, for forgiving her, your birth mother. I am unforgiving unless for selfish reasons, and it seems my reasons are as selfish as they come. I am trying to say that I am thankful for your grief—thankful, at least, that it keeps you here, where, daily, your cheekbones bend a little higher toward the stuff Mongolian bridges were inspired from, and little-woman, or soon-woman, I can feel you growing through our floorboards: bones lengthening in your torso, skin whipped by an upwind gust of prepubescence and today I bought three bottles of nail polish you’ll like from CVS, hues called Not Really A Waitress, Plasma, and If You’ve Got It, Haunt It, and, though I mostly bought the last one for myself, I bought all three for you in reparation for last week’s purchase, Miso Happy With This Color, which I painted on your toes and still feel bad about. You know by now not all of us are Irish. I know by now you knew all along why Aunt Donna gave you Asian Barbie dolls for Christmas; why, when you asked Mom buckling your car seat Did I come out of your tummy? she said, Grace you came straight from my heart and then got really quiet. According to your recent Google history there are lots of questions you aren’t asking and that’s probably my fault since you don’t ask questions the same way I don’t when I know I won’t know how exactly to respond, and all of us learn exactly by example. For example, the drugstore cashier on 106th is from a town three miles from your own and all I ever say is wave goodbye. Or that, with only sisters, I don’t know how to talk about a brother—yours. He’s probably with her right now—closing their front door shut to the cold; turning soap in his hands. Keep Him Around is a purplish polish I used on you last month, your sticky palms quiet on my knees, your fingernails shaped differently from mine, the family rosary going on and on around us. This family, like an afterworld. Our Lady of Loss. Our Lady of Is-There-Something-Fixable- Inside-Us. I can’t see your mother but I can see you hate yourself for wanting her. Forgive me for forgiving her for giving you away. Mothers are never a metaphor for something else. Our Lady of Teach-Us-That-Having-Been-Loved-Badly- Is-Not-the-Same-As-Being-Unloved. Our Lady of Not-Asking-Why. The broken heart has need for other hearts broken differently, but one sister in ruin ruins the other sisters identically. There are days when your footsteps out our kitchen and up the stairs carry you to places I can’t find you. Nights when the outline your body, peach-hot, fevers into your sheets looks nothing like your own. The past should go away but never does. It bangs inside us like an extra heart, though it is not. It is not at all like that.
