Harriend

A photograph curls up beneath a kitchen light left burning, their faces whitening over the gloss, my brother somewhere in the middle of it, my parents standing behind him, and behind them the older faces, each one softened by distance. each one giving the camera less to keep. Silence settles after someone says everything is fine, after it all shivers, every generation becoming harder to see without becoming any less present. Is suffering merely sequential? No, An unfortunate thing follows another until eventually the arithmetic exhausts itself, but some equations seem to have discovered how to reproduce. They travel without luggage. I have watched people I love make dinner after terrible news, laugh at tables where woe had already taken a seat, go to sleep with something broken under their sternums and rise before it has learned to heal. always something to survive, just beyond the door, waiting with its little receipt of consequence. And still, they loved. What touches them reroutes to me My family is not the ruin. But ruin has worn our address often enough. I can’t stroll down a blurry path anymore. I was spliced from antenna wire and buried in soil that transmits. I feel the dirt composing its slow yes in a language my molars still recognize. My mother checks the locks twice. Why are the good plates stacked so high up that I can’t reach them? A hand hovering over the thermostat. A glance toward the ceiling when the pipes begin knocking. The details of cutting a cake: how many pieces can be made? Is it enough? I have been drafting a note that says I'll be gone by morning light— the way a match means it before it's struck, an ordinary morning, happiness laid out on the table and my first instinct being to scour below it find the invoice before the gift. I’m cosplaying as a human, moving through the bright machinery of an ordinary life, a low electrical inheritance traveling upward through root and tooth. I have spent too long expecting the ceiling to cave in. A little girl practicing her own signature in glitter pen the letters wandering enormous across the page, each one wearing enough pink to be seen from space. She presses harder on the downstrokes. The paper buckles beneath her name. Nobody tells her yet that some names arrive with furniture already inside them, certain syllables have been worn smooth by mouths that needed them for other reasons. She only knows how beautiful it looks when the whole thing fits on one line. I'm watching her from the doorway. Doing my own math: how many years. Though the numbers keep arriving already underlined. buckling is the point. When I sign my name into someone else's, I will not be losing anything. I will be filing paperwork on a house that was condemned before I was born, returning a set of keys nobody remembers cutting, letting someone else argue with the foundation. I'll be gone by morning light Let the old keep the ledger, the debts, the address ruin already learned by heart. I will keep the hands. I will keep the tenderness and what they knew to do with them. Everything else, I am striking from the record.