Negotiations by Destiny O. Birdsong

Author:Destiny O. Birdsong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tin House Books
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

before giving my most accurate account.

Even in this moment, as I insist

on looking away, on the hallucinogenic

qualities of grief, my bones ask me

to recite the date, the current president,

and, finally, my name, which I now understand

as the jump ring on a chain of contiguous fires:

new nomenclature for my arrival

at a truth I must scale each time

before landing the next.

My Therapist Tells Me I Keep Dating My Mother

It’s the holidays, and the stretch of I-30 between

Little Rock and Texarkana is a vortex

of clouds, conical spires, black-veined concrete.

Your voice, cutting out over my headset,

is another kind of closing; I’m testing

logarithms here: what questions can I string

between mile markers to make you respond

with the breathless syllables of my name?

When I imagine your mouth baptizing

the collapse of bone at my hip, or the river

below this bridge kissing the rubber song

of my tires, my throat seizes.

The way home is a place where I remember

all the ways I cannot leave myself.

Do you tremble at the memory of your childhood address?

The water that ran rust-colored? The fenceless yards?

Section 8: an infinity of sameness. Did your mother

ever have to tell you good people can live anywhere?

That a woman pregnant with anything will eat dirt

to prepare for the possibilities of two deaths?

Talk to me a little while longer; I’m growing

something the color of my mother’s skin in the ’80s.

Something like my relief when she’d return

from chopping our Christmas trees in the woods

between our neighborhood and the city. She’d shake them

for birds’ nests and water moccasins on the car porch,

then make stir-fry or taco salads and chocolate chip cookies,

and it was the only place I knew where everything

could exist together and make sense,

like her complexion and mine. This was years

before the husbands, before the imprint

of the bathroom cabinet’s knob under her eye

like a swelling wreath of purple thistle;

before my brother, throwing tantrums at the airport,

and her breaking down, and me listing toward the gate

in shame as I did every year, to other mothers,

other gods. I think my hands will always be stained

with her blood; maybe there’s nothing I can do about that.

But the old days: the layered smell of peppers and pine.

Then one year, of rotting eggs from the heater

that almost killed us. What calm, before we knew

the language of storms—when there was no one

ahead of us to brace for, and no one behind us

we couldn’t carry home, dress in light.

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