dear eva, dear anna, dear alfreda,

the doctor forgets to tell me what the doctor is doing while the doctor is doing it so when the needle is inserted, i am surprised.

the needle forgets to dispense all of the numbing medicine or the doctor doesn’t use enough numbing medicine or the doctor is very sorry when i scream at the tiny scalpel and how i can feel it cutting.

the tiny scalpel is cutting away an invader. the invader has no country. the invader has picked me because i have neglected this body because this body has always been riddled with other bodies that have been neglected even before my body was itself a body.

the tiny scalpel takes on the invader and as a small scream escapes my body, i notice there is a painting on the ceiling of clouds. the doctor is very sorry the numbing didn’t work. the doctor is very sorry there are no birds painted in the clouds.

the scream is blue, the way the clouds float in a sky that is also blue, the way a baby coming out of me may look a little blue screaming.

the first thing she will see in the world are the scars.

the way the first things i had in the world were yours.

with love,
n

dear anna,

subdued by breakfast, myth licks her paws and curls up on the pink chair. the windows rattle with chance, the wind drags the past by her hair.

knowing exactly who is calling the shots is lost on morning’s mercy. i put the kettle on and clean the grinds out of the pot, do my best to keep what is behind us caffeinated.

in the hiss of the steam, a young man in soldier’s clothes floats, faces me, before turning shy and disappearing into the hollow behind the stove. in the groan of the dying fridge, i heard him explain. but is it the truth?

truth brushes myth with her fingers, the fur piles up into drifts, and i can hear you exhale.

i hear you,
n

dear alfreda,

even so close to so many of matisse’s girls, clad in silk always, i still get lost in the shadow of this painting— picasso’s the peasants, the barefeet a glowing corona over my head.

the woman beside the bull with eyes stiff but wild in the corners was perhaps once a real woman lost in these mute reds. the man’s hand lapping her deep-close maybe once had breath, in some other year, paint from his thumb flaked off into a blue petal into this one.

through many years of posing, i have learned how to look upon a thing and assess how it might be valued. this painting of the plainly clad, the looked upon, is worth so much.

and so— is this what luck is? does this, somehow, mean we’ve made it out? to come to witness the meaning, to walk among those who often tend what isn’t alive with more care than what is living.

for the bulls are perhaps a symbol as everything means more than we can even imagine. sometimes it is hard to believe the way people imprint meaning on every little gesture, every single word. maybe picasso just saw this scene and set his paint to it. and anyway, who are these people who decide what everything our dead did means? (i mean, we know who they are, but have you ever met a well adjusted rich person?)

i’m just rambling now. i know little about all of this but i’ve learned how to fake it well— to insert the lack and look at me now. when i close my mouth, i close it with intention.

let’s pretend, for the purpose of today, that the woman picasso painted is me and my mother, the flowers carried high above and you are the shoulder of the golden hillside.

the peasants was painted in 1906. right around the year the soldiers came to your mother’s true home but let’s imagine a day before, the hours simple and bright.

look— anna is rustling my braids, and there is eva, still alive and blueing the sky. i’m barefooted and leaning in toward the horns of the bulls and not worrying where safety begins or where truth begins or where fear ends.

love,
n