lynn nguyen fister

Is that what happened Lee?  Is that what happened?  Did you say that word?  The word that kills once it’s said?  Did it devour us Lee?  Where are you Lee?  I thought we’d be together if I could hear your voice saying that word.  I thought we could be hand in hand again.  Beetles between the crevices of our palms, sticky and sweet.  I thought you’d comb my hair again with your sea urchin.  I thought you’d make me swallow the sky again.  I could use that ladle you gave me.  Big or small.   Drink it like soup. I could ladle them stars into my mouth again.  Force it down throat.  Sew my lips closed in case I gag.  Sew mouth me.  Trap the moth larvae in there ‘til I found you.  Lee where are you?  I am looking for you.  I’m sorry I slapped you.  I’m sorry I left mushroom bruises there.  I would cry if I’d have a body.  Eyes.  I have neither.

            The sand spurs took you over. Saw it happen. And I emptied the sand out of my ears so I could hear you.  I was sand spurred too.  I heard you, even though you were just a pile of sand spurs.  That word.  I’ll never forget that word.  OOOOOeeeooooOOOO.  So holy it was.  Even I knew that.  It made me feel so whole, though those sand spurs ripped me into so many holes.  I am just a hole.  And mother?

            It’s so hard to concentrate, to focus on things.  Are there things?  I’m hardly sure.  We were on the dock and then.

            I remember things.  There used to be things I think.  Frogs.  You’d stick them on my tongues sometimes.  Close your eyes, you’d say.  Swallow.  Now you got yerself a tadpole a tree a’coming.  That’s how babies are made.  And then I’d hear bells.  From somewhere below.  Sometimes I’d feel a rumble and cough a tadpole into the lake.  Watch him I name him Lou; he’d swim away from me.  As fast as fast can be.

            So long ago.  Yesterday.  An hour ago.  Who knows.  Those loons.  Remember? We’d take paper bags to the lake.  Mother would send us to bed.  Let us feed the fish and then to bed she said.  We’d never sleep.  Mother to her room.  Mother you go to bed.  We go out the window on an owl.  A gentleman, he’d carry us to lake.  Clutched in hands fighting wind we had paper bags.  The kind you put lunch in.  The kind we wrap our collections in.  Dry twigs.  Mica. Dry and dead catydids.  Dry and dead chrysanthemums.  Candles.  And every night common loon calls. Gavia immer.  The barred owl would take us to them.  To the lake.

            It’s so cold here like it was there.  Winter hung from a cocoon husk.  We’d shiver in our jammies.  My sockless toes would fall off one by one from the freeze.  Thank you Lee for stitching them back every night.  Thank you.  Before mother saw.  She wouldn’t like my toes detached I think.  You so good with needle and thread.  And taught me how to catch the calls of loons in paper bags.  Hold it above your head like this, you’d say.  Use both arms, because when the loon call is captured in a paper bag, it goes boom.  Need both hands to hold the bag in place.  Fold it close quick.  That loon call will fight you.  It will bounce back in forth in that paper bag OOOOOOOeeeeoooooOOOOOOO.  Sometimes I was so scared that my loon call would escape, thumping a thump in that paper bag.  I pressed it to my heart.  Loon calls have more beat. 

            Swallow it, you’d say.  Swallow that loon call.  Before it escapes.  So I did.  Oh it rumbles. I caught one for you too.  And you swallowed it. OOOOOeeeOOOoooooOOO.

This was sort of like that word you said wasn’t it?    The one that sand spurred us, isn’t it?  Oh I think.  Don’t think.  I don’t know.  Lee I need you.  But I forget what you look like now.  Just remember paper bags.  Common loons.  A friendly owl.  Some frogs.