The world ended where our driveway met the daffodils. I remember years of darkness, barely a light bulb or two, dirty laundry and my brother setting botched fires.
Sometimes my father’s ache was a fist, sometimes a Chevrolet. My brother, the river he bled and I, just a tiny hollow-boned sparrow, unable to call out for mercy.
A broken mouth - the moment sound scattered - my father busting out of himself, jawbone, kidney, breathe, oil, puddles of milk, a life before this life, cancer, everything I can’t tell you.
Maybe that’s how history is made. Maybe the house grew into a memory hole, an entry wound that swallowed back all our orphaned parts.
Maybe nothing was far fetched, maybe by spell or by song a church could grow between the stitches, maybe the body could hex itself out of heredity.
We counted it in dog years, one – much less harrowing than seven – the length of time she tried with magic too weak to save us.
The sad steps of my ghost-mother as she moved from room to room gifting us honey, coins, water and a pair of finches-- bantam ruby hearts, one each, with which to begin again.
[Originally published in the collection 'Midnight Glossolalia', Meat for Tea Press, USA, 2023]
Lillian Nećakov is the author 8 full-length poetry collections including il virus (Anvil Press), Polaroids (Coach House Books) Midnight Glossolalia, a collaboration with Lauren Scharhag and Scott Ferry (Meat for Tea Press), and Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses eye with Gary Barwin (Guernica Editions). She lives in Toronto, Canada.