Isa Cruz

I pulled back the curtain too far

while I was trying to make sense

of the way memories sit on my tongue,

trying to sew together the frothing water

I used to wade into,

trying to sort through the separating clouds

where I thought I saw your face.

you came into my particles,

mixing with my matter before I fully formed, and now

I try to make out your shape behind my eyelids,

try to reach for what I walk into while I sleep.

 

my family believes in some things:

believes in the dogs barking and the porch light turning on,

my grandfather, the beekeeper, coming up the stairs

in the dead of night the day after he died.

believes in my grandmother’s sigh weaving its way around the waves,

knitting itself into the river,

her hands still gathering mint leaves by the big blue house.

believes in my uncle being

knotted into the mountains,

coming down in the leaves,

falling asleep on the worn couch and fading into dreams.

 

where does a body go when

it is scattered but everywhere—

perhaps dispersal is holy, so I listen

for their voices in a prayer at dusk,

I preserve their faces in mine.

please keep listening, because I want to believe in

grapes blooming from the same old arbor,

apples falling from the same old tree,

my grandmother quietly coming back to the porch,

the light flickering on.

 

in the stickiness of a certain cadence of footsteps,

my father’s brother took on a sheen of his father

reaching backwards and trying on the

clothes of the day after death.

I stop, looking up. do you believe in this?

do you hear the buzz as

the beekeeper’s hat, settled in a divine glow,

comes up the stairs like a beacon

beyond what you know for sure to be true?

 

when I hold these things in my palms,

when they settle into my bones, I know that

my uncle is in the cleaving apart of mountains,

the way the sun breaks out of the snow,

blazing fingers trailing everything I was supposed to say

when I could reach out and touch him.

now he watches me, lighting on

peak after peak after peak as I

climb, trying to search for what I should believe in.

 

I feel both my grandmothers when

the wind sifts through

the layers of my hair,

I hear them say my name

when dusk combs through the trees.

her hands on my shoulders, the dream she had before she died,

the dream I try to remember: I’ll believe in nothing if I don’t believe in that.