- Thinking of home your dad remembers mostly anger. Light warping off the metal walls of the slaughterhouse, resentment rising from the land like steam off hot water. Turning twenty and a tender wound. Told you once about the violence he fantasized about all those long teenage years. You stopped believing in sublimation around when you left the suburbs. In ‘09 your dad joined this immigrant church, bought the Bible and asked to be made anew. Brought you on Sundays to drown under a plastic tarp and learn about Jonah in the stomach of the whale. When you said Dad I don’t want to go anymore he said God will save us all, look: He already saved me.
- Coming to America, your dad found God and mine found Bruce Springsteen. I like to imagine him in the grad-school days, driving a shitty Toyota around San Diego, eating at the cheap places off the highway, marveling at the canned-food aisles. The car radio barely worked, all static, but if you were patient, waited for noise to blur into music, you could hear Springsteen sing about how it feels to be on fire.
- You stopped picking up your dad’s calls so now they all go to voicemail. The words halting, heavy, listen to them the way we used to X out mosquito bites, wait for the flash of pain. Heat, then relief. Same ending, every time. Okay Call soon Okay. You don’t, instead breathe in your anger. I think of lungs bitter with tar, bloody like ink in water. Meanwhile your mom takes good care of the old dog, the mutt with the sad eyes, the one your dad can’t bear to look at when she drags in a limp body, trailing saliva over the kitchen floor, prostrates before it, waits to be loved.
- Remembering childhood my dad tells me of summers playing in the forest, landscapes that were sparse, hostile. Watching the older boys toss rocks at passing trains, dare each other to lie across the tracks, press their cheeks to the rail and feel metal and light pass right through them. Ablation of the baby fat and the old fears. At eight, maybe nine, let loose with a neighbor’s son. Turns out earth can hold its resentment just like you did. Did you know there are still landmines in rural parts of [ ]? Nothing to stop [ ] from going right through a body, to stop little boys from [ ]. Walked home in the rain knowing it could have been him.
- When you say your dad still has nightmares, what you mean is that you don’t know if you’ll ever go back again. Picture sun-baked slaughterhouse, tender fruit, bitter rain. Mouth open. So many things I want to believe in. Level landmines into sidewalk, let all the old anger dissolve like steam, cough up blood and call home. Skin taut, my father at nine understood the boundary between body and explosion as impossible, permeable. Not much difference in the end, til he left so I could grow up on steadier ground. The night my dad returned alone he dreamed he was running through a forest, holding in his hands first a bomb, then the shuddering, tentative body of a baby. Beneath his feet the grass pushed up like something birthing itself. Like teeth forcing through pink gum. When I lost my first [ ] I spit it into his waiting palm and asked for nothing in return. All we wanted was faith.