I light the candle from my daughter,
a fish swimming with fins fluttering
as though light were a current.
Her father
he used to make his own candles
poured scented layers into orange juice cans
but not his anger
swallowed him whole like a whale
dark and mammalian.
On my room’s wall, an aunt’s India ink drawing,
her eyes as soft as challah, and hands
with the touch of embroidered napkins.
Carolina’s book of Cantoras
near Harjo’s poems sing through a moistened reed
of memory calling out new generations
into the opening of a Sunday
where dinner was pot roast. Back then I ran
outside to take my place
in the vacant lot
chicory, clover, empty cardboard boxes from new appliances
in a garden of broken glass
where I reigned as Queen of the ditches
strained mica schist, magic dust, a pinch could make
seeds grow inside cement.
On the sidewalk, hospitals and not forgiving
myself for saying the wrong thing when I should’ve
said it differently if only
next time I could do better, not wanting to swim
inside other swollen eyes who couldn’t see
how I fought to speak, and you
my daughter who comes from Paraguay
and gifts me with guampa and bombilla
sips yerba maté listening to music on Pandora
there’s so much to tell you
but telling comes in its own time
and has no expiration.
I don’t know most of it.
I never will. Sometimes I begin
to understand how everything that’s happened
illness and death,
my inability to draw people around me
like a warm wool blanket
are part of a longer story
echoes of a past generation
who wrote on the back of SS scraps, musical notation
on toilet paper folded and hidden in an attic.
I will never know names and
what they looked like only
to stay human in the most wrenching of times
they taught me to protect the one part of myself
no one could touch.
.