Written by tova g.

Inspired by Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

you rummaged through our mother’s house like a raccoon in a dumpster behind a westchester

diner & ran

away with memories of me, my hummed autobiography in disjointed colors like maya angelou’s

caged bird.

since the month i considered you dead i’ve been thinking about how you never taught me how to

mourn the living.

(you did think yourself the aristotle of death. your relationship became intimate when you

fucked him

with his black sweatshirt & scythe necklace in the back of a prius in a burger king parking lot.)

i remember when i

was eleven i dissected a cow eye & my friend hid it in her mom’s car. how can i gauge the

time of last

breath if there’s no nearly-warm body splayed on a cold autopsy table. if i could i would hold

the same rusty knife

as in my sixth grade classroom & like michelangelo crafting david (with poise &

godliness) etch

your skull until what you stole from me spilled out onto the unforgiving steel. i wonder how i

would feel seeing

my love for myself bloodied & undulating for the first time. maybe it would be like reuniting

with a long lost lover

after twenty years. (the only thing i know about jewish kabbalah is that there’s a divine spark

of god in everything,

including us. i’ve been searching for it in myself for six months but i’ve had a nagging feeling

that it’s in a box

under your bed wherever you are, a nightlight that burns a little too bright to let you sleep, &

unknowingly

keeps us both awake at two a.m., your own dorian grey portrait you hope one day

no one will find.)