Allison's Archives

The air conditioning proved pointless in her ten-year-old car
So we put the windows down as we wrestled with time
Someone had asked me her age yesterday at the salon
I had answered two years too young
She didn’t seem to mind very much
I did on her behalf

My mother is the only person around with whom
I can comfortably pick at my fingernails
A most glaring and inherited trait
She does it when stress rings the doorbell
I do it before stress ascends my porch

I asked my mother what to do with my anger
She taught me to turn it into grief
I came to her again asking what to do with my grief
She said you sit with it
And learn not to pass it onto your daughter
I’d rather I weren’t born if it meant
my mother would end up with a different life 

---

I leaned against the headrest and
Looked out the window for oncoming traffic
I thought about names fit for a son
Then thought about my brother
whom I will have to carry on my back to heaven
Even if I can’t follow him through the gates

How many more languages do I have to learn
before he can understand me;
before my grief can be justified?
Was it not enough that I had passed down every toy and book;
that I had emptied out all my shelves?

I was witness to his every flaw being forgiven
As they shapeshifted into my shortcomings instead
I cannot shake the memory of being
more a woman than a daughter or sister when I was just a child
I hope the ferryman indulges in my having made that up

---

He grew up underneath tall, shooting trees
Leaves crowded the way to heaven
No wonder he couldn’t reach up higher
God couldn’t coexist with the rubber trees
Just like my happiness and his pride

Should you need proof that I have been a dutiful daughter
Please tie me down and check my tongue for bite marks
and my palms for nail imprints
Do they remind you of tree bark incisions?

Our name places the wood above child
Is that why you taught yourself how to bear the weight of forests on your back?
And what shall we coin that:
Birthright, independence, or curse?

Most people, if they ever encountered god,
would seek the meaning of life
I’d like to know why anger kept running in our family line
And why it refused to stop even when it ran into me
Oftentimes I think it’s because my maternal family consumes the anger
And my paternal family is consumed by the anger
Where does that leave me?

I will bleed every tree until one of them answers
or until I am tapped out—whichever comes first

---

During reunion dinners, my chopsticks stubbornly refuse to pick up rice grains
I think it punishment for my slipping away from roots
For my feeling out of place among blood
Red is somehow, all at once, fortune, family, and fury

Age six in pigtails, in the driveway,
I was building a house out of sticks and leaves for a family of rocks
My grandfather walked over and kicked everything clean
That was the first instance I had learned
Those you share a roof with can have varying definitions of ‘family’ and ‘home’

Ultimately, who decides?
What unites?
Is it the grief or the anger?
The name or the blood?

I love you 
Forgive me for needing to walk away
To give my name its own meaning
Before finding my way back to the womb

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_{The accompanying image (Eve Overcome with Remorse by Anna Lea Merritt, 1885) serves only as a visual complement to the essay and carries no interpretive or illustrative claim beyond that.}