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By Root 1088 0

asleep, thumb in mouth, wrapped around her baby like a top. “I can see her,” you said. You could never see her, Mother. Not if you stood in that room all night. You could only see her plucked eyebrows, her bad teeth, the books that she read with fainting women on the covers. You could never recognize the kindness in that girl, the depth of her needs, how desperately she wanted to belong, that’s why she was pregnant again. You could judge her as you judged everything else, inferior, but you could never see her. Things weren’t real to you. They were just raw material for you to reshape to tell a story you liked better. You could never just listen to a boy play guitar, you’d have to turn it into a poem, make it all about you.

I went back inside, spread all her letters out on Rena’s wobble-legged kitchen table, letters from Starr’s and from Marvel’s, letters from Amelia’s and Claire’s and these last bitter installments. There were enough to drown me forever. The ink of her writing was a fungus, a malignant spell on birch bark, a twisted rune. I picked up the scissors and began cutting, snapping the strings of her words, uncoupling her complicated train of thought car by car. She couldn’t stop me now. I refused to see through her eyes any longer.

Carefully, I chose words and phrases from the pile, laid them out on the gray-and-white linoleum tabletop and began to arrange them in lines. Gray dawn was straining peaches by the time I was done.

It sickens me to think of you

a prevalence of void

unholy

immovable

damned. gifts.

an overblown sense of his own importance.

I wish you were dead

forget about you.

crow

florid with

fantasies

it’s so awful

a perfect imitation

a liability to love

forget you

Ingrid Magnussen

quite alone

masturbating

rot

disappointment

grotesque

Your arms cradle

poisons

garbage

grenades

Loneliness

long-distance cries

forever

never

response.

take everything

feel me?

the human condition

Stop

plotting murder

penitence

Cultivate it

you

forbid

appeal

rage

impotent

it’s too

important

I

cringe

fuck

you

insane

person

dissonant and querulous

my

gas tanks marked FULL

I glued them to sheets of paper. I give them back to you. Your own little slaves. Oh my God, they’re in revolt. It’s Spartacus, Rome is burning. Now sack it, Mother. Take what you can before it all burns to ash.

27

THE CRYSTALLINE DAYS of March, that rarest of seasons, came like a benediction, regal and scented with cedar and pine. Needle-cold winds rinsed every impurity from the air, so clear you could see the mountain ranges all the way to Riverside, crisp and defined as a paint-by-the-numbers kit, windclouds pluming off their powdered flanks like a PBS show about Everest. The news said snowline was down to four thousand feet. These were ultramarine days, trimmed in ermine, and the nights showed all their ten thousand stars, gleaming overhead like a proof, a calculus woven on the warp and weft of certain fundamental truths.

How clear it was without my mother behind my eyes. I was reborn, a Siamese twin who had finally been separated from its hated, cumbersome double. I woke early, expectant as a small child, to a world washed clean of my mother’s poisonous fog, her milky miasmas. This sparkling blue, this March, would be my metaphor, my insignia, like Mary’s robe, blue edged with ermine, midnight with diamonds. Who would I be now that I had taken myself back, to be Astrid Magnussen, finally, alone.

Dear Astrid,

Bravo! Though your letter as poetry leaves something to be desired, at least it indicates a spark, a capacity for fire

which I never would have believed you possessed. But really, you cannot think you will cut yourself free of me so easily. I live in you, in your bones, the delicate coils of your mind. I made you. I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name. Even in rebellion, you are mine.

You want my penitence, demand my shame? Why would you want me to be less than I am, so you could find it easier to dismiss me? I’d rather you think