It means Mom has lovers too.
Maybe her studio is a place where she makes more than art.
Dad says they’ve arranged it this way, out of love.
For who?
Not for us.
Dad reaches his hand to me.
Trying to offer comfort.
His fingers look too long,
disfigured.
All of their friends, parties,
the disco lights, red, green, blue, spinning.
Wine glasses. Joints.
April and me. The balcony. Alone.
There are no stars.
Just people lost
wandering
in the dark.
ABSOLUTE MAGNITUDES
After the meeting, I say nothing to her, to him,
take April, pull her to my room.
She starts to ask me what I saw.
I shake my head, say let’s just play.
Mancala. All those bright jewels
in all those shallow holes. One. Plunk. Two.
Hear them talking outside the room:
Dad wants to come in,
Mom tells him to give us time.
We do homework.
Help April with hers,
try to do mine.
My Astronomy textbook defines
absolute magnitudes as:
a scale for measuring the actual brightness of a celestial object
without accounting for the distance of that object.
If you get too close,
you might find
the actual brightness of something
can make you go blind.
Sirens go off,
cars on the Henry Hudson never stop,
all those tiny people
in their tiny cars,
driving around their tiny lives.
Brown smog parading
as a night sky.
NOWHERE
If your past is a lie, what happens to your future?
Open my desk drawer,
rip the corners off my Columbia application.
Open my planner,
scratch out Yearbook task lists,
draw blue lines across my hands,
a road map leading nowhere,
decorate page after page
with punctuation.
BEFORE
Before, James was April’s Spanish tutor.
Before, James was my dad’s Teaching Assistant.
Before, James was the person who played chess with Dad for hours.
Before, James was from Michigan.
Before, James had a story for each of his tattoos.
Before, James was fifteen years younger than my father.
Before, James was a drummer for a punk band.
Before, James was the person Chloe thought the hottest.
Before, James would tell me good books to read.
Before, James lived in Greenwich Village.
Before, James was the person who made my dad laugh the hardest.
Before, James was my dad’s running partner.
He was my dad’s best friend.
AFTER
Now
he will never be anything other than this one thing to me:
my dad’s lover.
THEN
My dad was:
A teacher,
marked up my English papers, endless lectures on Mesoamerica.
A gourmet cook,
chicken mushroom alfredo, tomato basil salad.
A craftsman,
the one who made his own Halloween costumes.
A movie lover,
the one who took us to see Back to the Future and The Goonies four times each in the theater.
A sentimentalist,
the one who framed every card we made him.
A husband,
someone who stood by his wife no matter where she was.
A parent,
the one who took care of us, woke us up for school on time, every day.
NOW
My dad, hidden behind a door, is only this:
another man’s lover.
OUT OF ORDER
I.
Dylan calls and says
come to Chloe’s.
April at a friend’s,
I go, leave a note,
don’t ask permission.
My parents don’t seem
concerned
with normal
family
rules.
We sneak out,
run down
her fire escape.
Chloe in her Kurt Cobain shirt.
We sing “Come As You Are,”
all the way to Ludlow Street.
Use our old fake IDs,
lie to strangers,
Dylan buys rounds of shots.
Dad and James. The bed.
Shot.
An open marriage. What’s always been.
Shot.
Chloe asks why I’m drinking,
I tell her it’s Senior year, right?
Time to party.
Dylan gives me weird looks,
but doesn’t ask questions.
I try to play the jukebox
songs from when we were young,
“Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Love Is a Battlefield,”
but the box keeps flashing red:
out of order.
I kick it once.
Lay my middle finger against the glass.
Dylan laughs, tells the machine it better watch out.
Chloe says we don’t need music, just dance,
and so we do.
II.
Next morning, stumble home,
pass April watching The Wonder Years.
Worried she will smell me,
I walk fast, manage a small hello.
Mom not here. Again.
Dad waves from the kitchen,
bent over a sandwich,
asks how my sleepover was,
I don’t wave
or answer.
Go to my room
but I don’t know why I’m there,
reach for my homework,
head pounding.
Can’t focus on it,
instead I tear
the Columbia application
all the way
in half.
Why would I want to
follow him there.
Then I go into my closet:
throwing everything
that was once folded—
pink, purple, gray—
onto the floor.
EDGES
Staring up at me
from the mishmash of sweaters
is a piece of the glass fish
I broke when Mom left.
Part of its eye.
Dusty yellow.
Sharp edges.
I sit with it
in my closet.
My stomach sick.
Like hanging on to the ledge of a building,
I squeeze the glass piece
as tight as I can.
When I uncurl my fingers,
red covers the fish’s remains,
my palm bleeds
just a little bit.
REARVIEW MIRROR
In an effort to be this so-called family,
we all go see The Glass Menagerie.
&
nbsp; Mom and Dad think a play about people
more confused than us will make us forget.
In the taxi home, Mom says
they’ve hired an art therapist
to help us process everything,
some woman named Ann
Mom knows
from the studio.
As Mom speaks, the taxi driver catches
my eye in the rearview mirror.
Pretends he didn’t.
I think about the play,
how Laura forgives Jim for breaking the horn
off her tiny glass unicorn,
then gives the hornless unicorn to him,
a symbol of how he
broke her.
I rub my forehead with my cut hand,
catching again the stranger’s eyes in the mirror.
Silence strangles all of us, as we fly past
Shakespeare & Company, H&H Bagels,
veer down West End,
spin the corner,
land right smack on Riverside.
We get out of the cab, Dad never saying a word
about Tom, Laura, the unicorn.
Usually he would’ve lectured us
on themes, metaphors, symbols.
Now, we’re all silent—
evidence left behind
at the scene of a crime,
lying motionless on an empty stage.
DREAMING INTO A DREAM
Art therapist Ann, armfuls
of bronze bracelets rattling,
asks us each to draw
a tree,
a house,
a person.
For her, I draw quickly:
trees as streetlights
houses as skyscrapers
people as shadows.
Later, alone:
I take my time, drawing what I want.
Two sisters climbing trees,
gardens to tend, bikes to ride,
neighbors, lawns.
A house, yellow, with a white fence.
A mom, pulling fresh cookies from the oven.
A father, tanned and tall, in a tie.
I hide this drawing under my pillow,
dream myself
into a dream
of a different kind of place,
a different kind of family.
RECORDING SESSION
October
SESSION TWO
(Sighs)
Just going down the line here with these assigned questions.
Three:
How did you choose your career path?
I had a teacher in high school who had me tutor other students. She thought I would make a great teacher myself. I listened to her.
Number four: Did you ever doubt your path?
Not really. As soon as I got to New York City, I knew I was in the right place. As big as Texas was, it doesn’t compare. This city’s a place where you can be anyone you want to be. A place where there’s always something to do. Always something new to eat. Always something happening in the street.
What does that have to do with teaching?
Well, teaching brought me to Columbia, and Columbia, the city. And the city brought me to your mother. We met in October, you know.
Yeah—
I’m not sure you know the whole story . . .
We were both marching in the Halloween parade.
She was a fairy with glass-beaded wings, me a praying mantis. She said, “Nice wings.” I told her hers weren’t so bad either.
Dad—
We drank wine at a patio bar and watched the parade go by. (Laughs) Both of us had trouble sitting with those wings on, so, after a while, the costumes came off and it was just us. We stayed up all night talking, agreed on so many things . . .
That’s—
The value of art and education. The importance of living life with an open mind. Letting love in, never being too rigid about anything—
Dad!
We’re supposed to talk about career here. Not take a trip down memory lane.
Well, I was going to say it was that night that your mom inspired me to follow through with my PhD plan and not stop at my Master’s.
(Pause)
So did you finish your application? To Columbia?
I’m not going to Columbia.
I’m not staying in this city.
Oh.
Okay.
That’s too bad, I was looking forward—
Number five: What career advice do you have for me?
Play to your strengths. Be true to yourself.
Well, that’s funny. Coming from you.
Pardon me?
Be true to yourself? The way you’ve been true to us?
Miranda—
What if you don’t even know who you are?
Miranda. You’ve always known who you are.
I don’t know anything anymore.
NO SPARKLING GOD
Septembers and Octobers we used to find
sequins on the soles of our bare feet,
feathers in the laundry.
Dad and Mom made their own costumes
every year before they met,
and every year after,
except the year she was gone.
They were always closest in the fall,
him poring over her sketches,
her handing him beads, a hot glue gun, a needle,
gifting him splinters of red glass
to glue on his shoes, wands, masks.
The past few years,
Mom and Dad
made costumes of all the
Aztec gods.
This year, they’ve made nothing.
This year, no one needs a costume.
Masks of Quetzalcoatl, Xochipilli,
big-beaked and feathered,
stare down at me,
line the hallway,
and just like you never really know
what’s on the inside of anyone
or any family,
on the outside
they are powerful, beautiful gods.
On the inside they are lifeless:
faces covered with fabric,
bones carved from Styrofoam.
COSTUMES
This year, Halloween night:
April, dressed as an angel,
goes to the parade
with a devil-horned Mom and Dad.
They invite me to come,
even made some wings for me.
I stay uptown, leave my wings at home,
a group of us weave through the Upper West Side.
Bart Simpsons and Madonnas blend in
with the vampires and princesses,
we pass a couple in matching Axl Rose bandanas.
Last year, Adam and I, matching troll dolls,
my hair pink, his orange,
sipped Coke from Solo cups,
R.E.M. blasting from the radio.
We went to the roof,
troll hair blowing up,
he told me he loved me,
loved how alike we were,
his eyes gleaming above me,
surrounded by all those skyscrapers, that navy sky.
I used to think I’d lose my virginity to him.
Now Dylan, in his pirate patch,
calls me Matey, breaks out his flask.
Asks me if I want a sip.
I take two.
Chloe meets us on the street—
a roller-skating candy cane.
Asks what Dad came up with this year
and why I’m not in costume.
&
nbsp; I lie, tell her I’m tired, spent all night
helping him sew.
Say my dad’s going
as his favorite flower,
one species disguised as another,
a bird-of-paradise.
I follow through the streets,
matching Chloe and Dylan sip for sip,
watch as kids litter
candy wrappers everywhere.
CASSIOPEIA
Yearbook staff ’s on board
with the outer space idea.
They brainstorm like lightning:
classes in constellations,
faculty in rocket ships,
give each Senior an astronomical mission.
Somehow the theme has given them inspiration—
they draw and choose and pick and label.
As they work,
I feel myself floating
above them,
like Cassiopeia
hanging upside down
in the fall sky.
Try and keep myself focused, occupied,
anything to be away from home.
They ask if I want to see their work,
if I need to check it, I wave my hand, say it looks okay.
They ask questions over and over,
I have no answers, I shrug, say whatever.
After they’ve left:
My eyes wander over
their neatly laid piles of layouts,
pause at the one they worked hardest on,
a “field day fun day” collage.
Everyone looks so happy, carefree.
I crumple each corner.
Make a tiny rip through the center,
then keep ripping it to bits.
Eyes.
Hands.
Hair.
Just shreds of people
scattered at my feet.
HOT AND COLD
After school,
I walk right past the unsorted mail.
Dad says we need to talk college—
if I’m serious about not going to Columbia,
then I need to see other schools.
He’s trying to pretend things are the way they were,
that I’ll be there, hanging on his every word.
I tell him I don’t need his help,
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