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[mxbatwrites]

aquarium killjoy (april 2018)

a young white father smiles at me after i tell his daughter not to touch the sea anemones’ mouths he smiles, all middle america charm, and says

yeah, it’ll eat ya

he smiles and his smile says         play along         tell the impressionable young girl the harmless unknown will hurt

this happens countless times a day it is always a father or a brother (the mothers and sisters say it too but it’s a question a concern – will it bite? – is it safe?)

the fathers say

the anemone will bite your hand the crabs will pinch you the octopus will jump on your head and swallow it

and then they smile

and their smiles say         play along   

so i smile back and say actually—    touching the anemone’s mouth will hurt it, not you    the crabs are too small to pinch    the octopus’ beak is sharp but small, and he is docile and shy and so i smile but i do not play along because at least this is a game i can play at

sometimes, the fathers and brothers and boyfriends play a different game they coax and reassure a friend or daughter or son or partner someone afraid of the tiny creatures before them the men reassure until their companion trusts the water and reaches out to brush their fingers over a sea star and then the men scare them they shout or make a sound and poke and pull at their companion

the men tell their companions look, it’s okay and then punish their friends and children when they believe them

[mxbatwrites]

real (april 2018)

when little kids at the aquarium want to know if something in the touch pool is alive, they almost always ask me if it’s real. and what a strange idea that is. the idea that upon death, you cease to be “real”. what would that say about our grief? about our fear? maybe this is what we mean when we say we fear the unknown. maybe we fear the unmaking. when i was younger, i was acutely aware of mortality. i would refuse to go to bed if i had not said ‘good night’ and ‘i love you’ to my parents because i was deeply afraid one of us would die in our sleep over the course of the night. to children a seashell is not ‘real’ and so a corpse is not ‘real’, the the times in my life i have seen dead bodies i thought they looked more wax than flesh. i never saw my father’s dead or dying body but i know he died bloated and orange from liver failure. would his body have looked real? if i had seen his corpse, would his absence feel more real, or would i still be afraid of a ghost? would his bloated body haunt my dreams like a cursed wax figure brought to unlife, uncanny and strange? i don’t know what tracy’s body would have looked like after because she’s been gone for more than five years and i still cannot picture her lifeless. if i had seen her, would i mourn her easier? would it have felt more real?

[mxbatwrites]

an image in my pinterest feed says 'take a selfie; fake a life' (2019)

and i start thinking about this teenage boy i work with, and how he talks about his mom. she wants to take photos of everything, and it annoys him. he thinks they should enjoy the moment instead of capturing it on a phone. i see what he’s saying. there are times i feel the same, i guess. like when we’re going on our yearly christmas eve drive through dark streets to look at the lights. but even then, i take pictures, record short videos, all to show the grandmother who is no longer healthy enough to visit us for christmas. 

when my mom was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, she spent most of 2013 in treatment. chemo, then radiation. i wasn’t at home, and she couldn’t work, so she had a lot of time to think. and she told me one day, i don’t remember when, that she realized she was never in our family photos. there was the odd shot of her, every once in a blue moon, but most of them were me, or my grandma, or me and my grandma, and older ones had my father in them, but almost never mom. she never wanted to have her picture taken because she was overweight. 

she started wanting to take pictures with us, after that. selfies of her and my grandmother, pictures of all three of us, new years eve and christmas shots of her and i, sitting in the living room. 

one year, i wanted to make my mom a book of photos for mother’s day that had this poem i’d written her in it. i spent a whole day one winter break, cross legged on my bedroom floor, looking through decades and decades of envelopes of old photos. baby pictures. old birthday parties. pictures from before i was born, from before my parents ever even met. but there was one thing i couldn’t find, not in any of the hundreds of pictures i looked at. 

there wasn’t a single photo that had my mother and her best friend tracy in it. there were scant few pictures of my mom at the ish house, at parties their, and pictures of tracy, but no single photo with both of them in it. the closest i could find was a picture of me, my mom, tracy’s daughter, and a bunch of kids all piled on tracy’s bed. i guess she must have taken the picture. 

decades of friendship, and there wasn’t a single picture of my mother with her best friend. tracy passed away in 2011. i have pictures of myself with her, but none of her with my mom. none of the three of us. not even when katie and i were babies, born only five months apart, not even when my mother and tracy were pregnant at the same time, not even at my mother’s wedding to my father.

and i would be my mom and i both wish we had all taken more pictures. more selfies. sure, it’s good to enjoy the moment and not worry about documenting every moment of your life from instagram. but there’s going to come a moment when you look back, and something you want to remember is a blank spot in your memory. there’s going to come a time when no matter how much you loved a person, a day, an event, an experience, it’s going to begin to fade from the fallible human memory. and you’re going to say

i wish i’d taken more pictures. 

i wish i had a single photo of my mom and tracy. of my mom, and tracy and me. of our families, together and happy, before everyone started to fall apart. 

i keep the single photo i have of tracy and i on my phone. we’re on a beach. my mother is not in the photo, but she’s taking it. i know that she was there. it’s not enough but, it has to be enough. 

[mxbatwrites]

truth is complicated (october 2016?)

it was a thursday i know because i emailed my surf culture teacher and told him i wasnt going to be in class

you died on a thursday i didnt go to your funeral because i wasn’t home because i was hundreds of miles away from anyone who knew your voice or face

i visted your gravesite on an unseasonably sunny december day only you could make the san francisco sun shine in winter you didn’t have a headstone yet and we ate gordo’s burritos and i apologized to every body i walked over to reach you and my mother left me alone so i didn’t have to feel bad for crying

we made you a box of sand and rocks and seaweed from the beach where we watched the sunset but we just can’t bring ourselves to take it to your gravesite it lives in the trunk of mom’s car a tiny piece of you because we don’t have anything left

my father must have died on a monday because my mom came home from school and told me and she only has monday afternoons off i knew it had happened because she texted me and said she needed to talk to me and i knew he had died and taken this last thing from me too

i didn’t go to his funeral because his mother donated his body to science and also because i didn’t want to his mother called us and told us it was our fault i slept on top of my mom on her futon bed like a toddler and cried

i wasn’t sad i still don’t really know what i was but all i knew how to do was cry about how you died and how my father died and on the same damn day and now i could never mourn you without his ghost watching

you died five years ago i didn’t go to your funeral when i go home on vacations i run my fingers over the red corduroy coat that once belonged to you i wore it in a play once i wish you could have seen me act i wish you could have met the love of my life i wish my children would be able to know you in a tense other than past

i wish my children would know their grandfather as something other than a backstory something other than a cause to my effect

you died on a thursday i didn’t go to your funeral it’s getting harder to remember your voice

[mxbatwrites]

like the sewing kit in my mother's bathroom cabinet (june 2016)

i am unravelling my skin and sinew untwisting from bone bobbins coming apart at worn seams

i need you to spool me into your arms smooth frayed and broken strings with warm fingers

[mxbatwrites]

i am always going to be like that (june 2016)

hook your finger through jaw like a caught fish press fingertip and nail into the cankersore that nags beneath your tongue trade one pain for another

[mxbatwrites]

i don’t know what to do with it, this feeling i cannot name. disconnection but not quite disassociation. adrift, but land within sight. like the vague nausea i feel before i get the hiccups, and somehow always forget proceeds me getting the hiccups. 

a vagueness, building somewhere, me left wondering what it is. where it’s going. 

sometimes emptiness has a weight, and that is the feeling in my chest, like my heart was a balloon full of the world’s heaviest gas. there’s nothing there but it’s sinking down, down, down. 

the way the mental and the physical bleed together, sitting on the sofa, thinking about the slow throb in my ribs 

is the pain in my chest, or my chest? i don’t know how to tell anymore. i don’t know if they’re different anymore. 

how do you know if the way your body feels is wrong when it’s the only way you have ever felt? 

i had only ever used it broken, how was i supposed to know. 

i never used to cry and now i cry all the time. like i thought i was stopping the faucet from leaking but i just unhooked the water line. but one day it rained and rained and rained, and the pipes rusted and leaked and leaked and rusted and they drip into the old damp chipboard cabinets.

this body is cold and damp, but it is home. 

like a hermit crab who crawled into a shell much to big for him and never left, it is my only home. 

like skin that doesn’t fit like bones that knock and chafe

like a body made from spare parts and worn thread like a heart made to break

[mxbatwrites]

october 2nd 2018

i wrote this at work. i have a lot of complicated feelings about my father. these are some of them 

content notes: familial death, alcoholism, mentions of verbal abuse, cancer

it’s your birthday today and on saturday it will have been four years since you died

and i still don’t know how to feel or how i do feel (either or)

the last time i spoke to you (other than when you were dying) was december 19th, 2012 i remember the exact date because it was the same day my mother, your ex wife of nearly twenty years, was having a cancerous tumor removed from her breast which was the only reason i was speaking to you you were on the (long) list of people i was updating and fielding texts from

i was exhausted and stressed and scared and the last thing i wanted to do was play phone tag with my verbally abusive father so when you kept texting, leaving voicemails i bit the bullet i ripped off the bandaid (pick any metaphor you want, anything works as long as it hurts) and i called you

and i explained to you, as calmly as a nineteen year old girl whose mother was in surgery could, once i knew anything i would text everyone and let them know i wasn’t ignoring you i just didn’t know anything yet (We ended up spending sixteen hours in that hospital waiting room)

and you you, ever the asshole, ever juvenile and selfish told me you were ‘sorry for caring’ the next day, when we finally got to go home, i told my mother what you said and she told me i never had to speak to you again and what does it say about you, about me, about us, that when I think of you, of your death this is always what i think of your voice, biting and sarcastic over a phone call in a hospital waiting room “sorry for caring” breaking my heart all over again from a different state

i talked to you again, one more time, while you were dying sometime in that endless week between when mom told me you went into the hospital and when she left work early on october 6th 2014 (it was a monday) telling me she needed to ‘talk to me’ and i knew you had died

i don’t remember anything you said to me i told you i didn’t forgive (i still haven’t) i told you i loved you (i still don’t know if i meant it)

the next day, mom talked to you, and you had no memory of speaking to me

and when you finally died, i think it was the first time i ever really let myself be mad at you because–– of course you got to forget got to die and leave me, barely an adult, struggling with the things you did and you died and i lived with the consequences of your actions

and it’s fitting, because you were always so goddamn good at playing the victim so good at blaming the alcohol or the past or your parents or my mother or me you never once gave me an apology that wasn’t selfish, wasn’t meant to ease your guilt instead of my pain so it’s fitting that even in death, you were selfish

burning down the house and dying in the blaze,  leaving the rest of us to burn our hands cleaning up the mess you left behind.

[mxbatwrites]

remembrance (2019ish)

i am so blessed that my last memories with you are happy ones. 

i don’t know why this memory always stands out to me, but when i miss you i think of you, me, and mom in that mcdonalds in monterey in the middle of the night. you wanted french fries, so we went in after spending a day in town, and actually sat down and ate in the restaurant. i had fries, and vanilla soft serve, and a coke. and we sat in that mcdonalds, talking and laughing, and it was the summer my dad moved out, and everything felt so light. 

that same trip, we went to asilomar beach, and we sat in your van on the side of the road and watched the sunset over the ocean. we were waiting to see if we could see the green flash, the moment the sun finally sunk into the sea. and i swear to god we saw it. sometimes, being around you was magic like that. 

the last time i saw you in person was the first time i ever ate salted caramel. it always makes me think of you, now. you came to visit mom and i, just for the day, and we drove to yountville and sonoma, and we bought fancy sweets and bread and lunchmeat. you bought a container of salted caramels at bouchon and shared them with mom and i. 

after my mom told me you died, i went and got a salted caramel frappucino, because you were also the first person to give me caffeinated coffee. (we were at a gymnastics meet for michael and katie; i left my guiness book of world records in your car.) i walked on the beach and poured some of the coffee into the foaming ocean waves. 

the last time we spoke was over the phone, sitting in my mom’s car in the dark safeway parking lot after my high school graduation. you told me you loved me. you told me you were proud of me. 

i wish you could see me now. i wish you could see me graduated from college, holding down a steady job, living with the love of my life. 

one of my earliest memories is of your house. i don’t know how old i was, but i was young. i was going over for a sleepover with katie, all by myself, for the first time. we met you half way between our houses, for lunch. i’m pretty sure it was an applebees. we took katie to gymnastics that night, and it was storming, and you drove me around in the rain. then it started hailing. we stopped by the side of the road, by this vast, icy puddle, and gathered hail stones into a water bottle, so katie could see them. we put them in your freezer. you saved them for years. 

i don’t know if i believe in the afterlife, but wherever you are, i hope you’re happy. i hope things are easier for you there than they were while you were alive.  i hope you know you are loved, and missed, every single day. 

[mxbatwrites]

local poet writes yet another poem about death

i know it’s silly to fear something as certain as death.

in the end, no one will ever escape it, so,

what’s the point?

i guess, maybe, the point is i don’t really fear death, but loss

and death is the only loss you cannot hope someday comes back to you.

i guess this is why people believe in the afterlife. heaven. ghosts. reincarnation. 

we are desperate for a way to undo what can’t be undone, to find a way to bring back things that have been lost to us. 

maybe death is just a place where lost things go.

maybe the silver ring i could never find is just as dead as my grandmother, as my father, as my mother’s best friend.

maybe heaven is a place for things that can’t ever go home again.  a dog that ran away. a father who left. a teddy bear, dropped unseen during a family vacation.

maybe the afterlife is full of lost loves and left socks. 

maybe dying is just a cardboard box labelled lost and found

full of things people stopped looking for.

[mxbatwrites]

i do not want this body anymore;

this crumbling grade school architecture, this house of broken popsicle sticks and old glue, this jenga tower with all the middle bricks pushed out,