broughtagain

[broughtagain]

hey come here rq i gotta tell you something. its just that all history is oral history & the mythos precedes the method so every story you've ever been told is a tether, no matter how true, whether from a friend or a textbook, between you & the teller & everyone else who knows.

this is why some stories yoke nations but others are a single taut line.

this is why the story my grandmother told me of how she met my grandfather isn't for you, but this one is:

when she finished the telling she asked me to play the piano for her, something peppy, or romantic. afterward in the ringing pocket of the last note she sat smiling at me for a while until her smile sank behind her cheeks & her eyes were the eyes of the untethered. then, very quietly, she told me i looked a bit like how her husband used to look & asked if i'd like to hear the story how they met. and, bearing the ropeburn, i said yes, and yes, and yes.

[broughtagain]

someone left a mirror in their yard across the street from my apartment last fall & kinda just left it there over the winter. it's been sitting slanted against their blue fence gate so long that its just collecting rain at this point.

probably when it was nice out & the sky & the fence were the same color it seemed like a gallery idea to stitch them together with mirror but it's been such a birdless march and the newest coat of paint on the fence is peeling already.

now the johnsongrass has taken over a little and there's dust on the glass. they might clean it in april but idk if anyone even lives at that house anymore.

it's a nice neighborhood though. there's a taco place & protected bike lanes going both ways. a lot of the porches have little charms or windchimes. everyone packs the curbs with cars except right now where a bunch of bluebonnets limbo'd up into the sidewalk buffer & someone put up flagging take and some cones.

[broughtagain]

they're burying the powerlines near my house in austin & as I was driving by today i saw the arborists in their little hats getting ready to cut back these huge treaty oaks which had probably been saplings before america. & i got really sad while i watched them spray paint all over the branches, but i wasn't sad for the trees. i was mourning the power lines. i didn't grow up in a place with big oaks, but weren't the tangled black cables crossing from pole to pole a kind of forest? & i didn't i have a kind of childhood under that canopy? in the summer we tied our old sneakers together and tossed them onto the wires & tried to scare away the stupid lines of pigeons & stapled posters of lost pets on the rotting wooden poles. now theyre cutting it all down.

have you seen what they've been building lately? how quickly they're trying to replace all the old buildings and repave the roads with sterile perfect objects? as long as there are acorns there will be oaks but i worry the beautiful imperfect things we made with our hands will be edited away. what if the painters at lascaux had scratched off the buffalo & bears & handprints because they looked kinda ugly? how would we know their fingers looked like ours & they were scared of the dark, too? where will kids put up posters of lost pets? that forest brought my cat home to me and when he died i buried him in the yard with a stone i etched his name into and i hope no one ever moves it.