some things float when they should not, like lamps in the dining room, and some things fly when then should not, like my five-year-old self swinging on my mother’s hand across the gap between the train cars. my father held all our bags and someone must have had my baby sister, but all i could see was the long tunnel of train cars lined up like tin can telephones. i walked the tightrope between, swaying and watching the tracks clatter beneath my feet.
i lay awake last night after an hour of coaxing my shoulders into a curl against my mattress, staring at the rectangle of yellow light coming from the kitchen of the girl with no soul. my window shade lay crumpled on the ground. i do not know whether it was awake or asleep, although i do know it was not curled, but heaped. i lay awake because needed to think of a language without the letter n. albanian has no w, chinese no th, german no ch, but how could anyone’s world be like mine without the letter n? if we took it away, there would be no perëndisë, no bi-wen-ya, no no one, no nowhere, no nothing, no naked, no not, no no,. but there would still be krieg, no matter how many letters we subtracted from our ledgers and abacuses.
speaking of things subtracted and things added and things revealed that should have been left hidden: should anything be left hidden? perhaps bodies in the cemetery, perhaps certain tufts of hair (although perhaps not), perhaps the identical gap in her uncle’s smile. her father always had perfect teeth.
people are staring in my window again, friends of the girl with no soul and newly bleached hair. they are all boys, they all smoke great puffs of burning tobacco that catch, writhing, in the screen of my window, they all talk too loudly when they are drunk and i know who they love. it is only fair that i know. they know the shape of my mouth when i sleep.
they say and i know that i lack a centre: indian boxes all stacked inside each other and holding nothing, but so dense and orange without cause. even now, hello dolly is a siren in my ear, iceland the muse in the other and one of my eardrums has been shattered since that day our airplane flew too high. and in between, who knows, other than a wedding ring my father found on the ground in thailand that makes me someone’s bride, someone with the eyes of a untamed lion demanding my surrender.
i am my vulture-eyed lover’s fountain pen, the length of my body running green and deep.
the light in the kitchen has gone out and no one watches me lying in a curl on my mattress. perhaps she has a soul after all, although there is a loaf of bread lying in the roof’s corner slashed into strips the size of the marbled spoons my mother bought me.
