sacramento street
1. i arrived at the sacramento street house again, after a night of drinking wine and eating off tiny tapas dishes with friends. we shared a cigarette in a circle like we were back in high school. i carried my bags upstairs to find a lighted hallway; i know where the keys are now and where my bedroom is. it’s all familiar now; a second home that is only mine in small increments of time. a big grey cat is waiting for me under the bed. my memory always wanes when im here but there are more family portraits in my room, which used to be henry’s room, who now lives in brooklyn as a 28 year old. he has a robo dog i always wanted and a magic eight ball i want now. i think about you and your brother as children, watching moomin cartoons and old black and white war documentaries.
2. i lie on the bed, in the flannel another man left me and think about calling you but also think of running a bath, drinking some tea, talking to the cat underneath the bed, in an attempt to make him love me. the cat always rejects me while im here; i attribute it to him sensing my mood, always anxious, at the thought of being at a house that isn’t mine, always afraid of losing him or leaving the stove on. the first time i was here i came with three suitcases and an omnichord, everytime i come back i carry less with me but more in me. you call, saying you’re thinking about me, we chat for an hour about the disillusion we both carry about our accomplishments or lack of. you say you’ve never had a proper job or girlfriend and i having both at some point only listen – maybe this is our relationship to one another – we strangle the same demons but only you give them voice. you say this is crazy but do you want to hang out and i say yes. i would drive for miles and miles with you in the dead of night. i put on lipstick and earrings and meet you outside. we spent the night at your place, watching columbo with your arms wrapped around me and i fall asleep in one of your tshirts and the next day the flannel another man gave me drapes on your wooden floor with a look in its eye that i’ve seen before. why am i constantly betraying him?
3. i bump into your parents on the street, i recognize them from afar but hope they dont remember me but they do. your mother still has a thick finnish accent and your father a toothy grin and your same face, but older. we make small talk and cinco de mayo is mentioned and i wonder if she thinks im mexican ; because one of your exes is half mexican and lives in texas and she’s married now. maybe this is what your boy likes, i dont know. maybe i’m just another pretty brown girl that will be replaced by a newer model in two years. we were just talking about you, your finnish mother says, and i say oh! because what else can you say; i think about you all the time / are you happy / are you lonely / can we both understand each other / i wish we could sit in your littleton cabin at the dining table with the marimekko cloth placed over it and i could ask you the questions i am asking myself for my future. did you know sometimes i lie on the floor of the bedroom and look at your painting of the finnish countryside and a man that looks like your son / my lover / and i always think it’s him but i think it’s your brother? do you have a brother and did he die in that war? did i make that up to give you layers? No it was a heart attack that convinces your son he will die the same way. happy cinco de mayo!
4. one time you were driving us and i asked you if you thought you’d be a good father and you said “mediocre” so i asked if you thought i’d be a good mother and you said “yes” and we stopped talking about it. the dog spent the night at your parents'.
5. you told me a story when we first met; there was freshly laid cement on the sidewalk and your father was so excited he put his hand on it and returned to your house to show off his achievement so you too, put your hand in the sidewalk and a neighbor reported your father who then got a letter from the cementing company about how he destroyed city property and would be charged accordingly. your dad had to get a lawyer friend to write up a letter about how good and outstanding a citizen he was, and your mother was worried the whole summer that her husband would go to jail. i recalled this story again to you while we walked back to sacramento and you chuckled. your father never outed you as his accomplice, claimed in court that it was his two hands that laid on that sidewalk in cambridge, that got cemented yet again after this whole fiasco, further burying son and father in their childish mistakes.
6. sometimes i walk around and try to figure out who’s sidewalk it is im on.
7. at 18 you wrote a protagonist that lived in a house with a dog named Family in cambridge after his parents deserted him who ate quesadillas at Anna’s because they were better than burritos. we go to anna’s and i get the quesadilla as well, because you shrug and say they’re the best and longer than a standard burrito; i’ve had these i was as tall as them and i laugh and pain at the thought of you as a small child, living in cambridge, holding your mother’s hand and coming here; it hasnt changed much since you grew up here, right? no it has, because you can recall places i have no memory of, and i’ve walked these streets for a long time.
8. at your parents house we eat lasagna your mother made. mother’s day is tomorrow and you have no plans for a gift or get-together; in a way, you claim, it’s up to my dad to plan it because he made her a mother. and you? i exclaim, you’re her son! shrug. shrug! there are two small plates with foxes carved into them that i like. they hang on opposite sides from your sink, in the middle a finnish drying cabinet, in your kitchen. foxes, you say, are your mother’s spirit animal (i dont bother), she was called fox by her friends when she was young. what’s a fox doing here, with her red hair and hands that paint portraits of the farm she grew up on and the boys she watched grow into men that shrug at the thought of Mother’s Day. grow grow grow / is there anything left of women after all that growing takes place inside and outside of us?
9. i think a lot about my existence in relation to men, how they exist mirrors my own presence in the world, and i come to the conclusion that most men don’t see me as a person but rather a woman, i say over espresso in cups your grandmother painted in either '82 or '89, we can’t decipher. by that standard, you counter, you don’t really see men as people either.
10. you look for string to show me cat’s cradle after i use a rubber band and my fingers to predict what your first born’s gender will be. a bow unravels from my fingers, i hold it up with my red-chipped nails, a daughter i say. you sleepily said you wanted daughters to me when we laid in bed together one night, on opposite sides. i have a feeling i’ll end up raising sons, possibly two or three, but i fear for your daughters, raised in the same boyish gaze i love in you so much.
11. what will i leave my children? your first memory, you confide, is you at 11 months old in israel in a stroller, with a camel looking over you. your first ever birthday gift, a fish wind chime in your mother’s painting studio. your childhood cactus, as tall as me with its tip limp and browning. you childhood photos, same expressions with thick brown hair that will eventually fall off, starting at a young 14, (bad genes), to leave me a heavy head hovering over expressionless eyes. your ceramic plates, with your name carved into them; two s'es that look like lighting bolts. your grandmother’s woven blanket with her initials, HH. like a pearl, you say, a good grandma name. what will be left of me? my poorness or illness or desire to be the best? i hope my children find my journals once im dead or maybe when i am alive, and read them out loud in the kitchen while i am away, showing me to another woman in their life, passing me on.
cambridge, 2022