into the mountains to be closer to God, she said. I looked up to the stone ceiling and asked if she still felt God up here after what had happened. She said, God was not in the sky, but in here, and touched her chest. In the mountains it’s quiet enough to hear him. The daughter [I can’t remember her name—maybe don’t mention her at all] brought me a plate of rice and placed it delicately on the table beside the teacup. The son apologized for not having any forks. I asked the mother what it felt like. The son, his back still straight, continued to translate for his mother. She said it was like a wind that makes people disappear, until sons and daughters are only names and words. She waved her hands as she talked. Sometimes the disappeared exist in the songs we sing. If they’re fortunate, their names are printed in the newspaper where they live for a day, maybe two. But mostly they simply disappear. [Maybe, here, add reference to more commonly known disappeared people? Chileans under Pinochet?] I asked her if she ever thought of leaving, that perhaps God wasn’t in the mountains as she suspected. She said, we cannot afford to disbelieve in God. We will pray for better lives. We will feed our children shrapnel. We will teach them to dance to the sound of bombs. The sunlight ventured further in the house, touching the mother’s bare toes underneath the table. The other villagers told me many were burned alive, I said. What do you remember about the fire? The mother closed her eyes as her son translated my question. She said, Our families were carried to the sky in those heaps of black ash. They will come back down to visit us as mountain snow in the winter, and the snowflakes will melt in our palms [It’s unclear here if the son poeticized the translation]. I sipped my tea. I turned the recorder off. The boy relaxed his shoulders and asked if it was over, asked if he could see the article when it was published. I told him I would try, though I didn’t know how much space the newspaper would allot me.
Painting a February Sky
On this palette, will mixing black and violet uncover the nameless colour tipping over the horizon, grief entering sky’s consciousness, dark-plum wine spilled and bleeding from the other sides of the canvas? My body lured to marvel at its secondary colours, to trace this page’s primary words. When I mix this much love with drops of despair, do I create heartbreak, inertia? Do I arrive at what I’m becoming? Words, like colours, have gravity, they exert pull, break in each other’s wakes. Isn’t all matter subject to gravity? Yes, but not like this. The way words pull you into me, like faith stirred by desire. To gather art to its primary source—search for what has no name. Look up: mystery, distance, beauty mix alchemically to unveil this exact shade of moon.
August, After Moonset
We counted shooting stars aloud during the Perseids.
(I saw ones beyond your peripheral and didn’t tell you. I’m sorry, but I needed them for me.)
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