CONSIDER THE HANDS
YOU WILL NOT TOUCH
Quiet your mind. Hard work and luck surround you. Take a shower
before you make a big decision. What an older sister said about our
bodies sagging was right, but she was wrong about when, how, why.
Like how the word hunger remembers itself in every language no
matter how you chew it. Season your skillet properly is all I really ask.
The last lie you told doesn’t count because when you said it, you
wanted it to be true. To wash plastic before you recycle it is to
consider the hands you will not touch. The boy who declared the
worst thing about you was something a man did to you—tell him you
loved him too. Inside another book is one mother’s anger so fluid with
her sadness it is nearly a puddle you can see yourself in. Inside
another apartment is the phrase natural light. Inside another sink is
nothing. Your losses return to you like a hammer to a string. There is
this sour ache in the archive of your guts. You want to know what
happens next and you will. Sometimes you will know before it
happens. But this will be coincidence. Have you seen what people are
doing to live? The longest part of your life is calling for an image.
—
ONLY ONCE IN THIS LIFETIME
WERE YOU THE BUR OAK
When you want to be one of the bur oaks in the open field of Jarry
park, you think about other things, too, but most of the time you
think about the bur oak. The yellow-green cling of its bark. How
time would merely ring inside you. It’s a specific bur oak, but you
also often think about how many bur oaks there are in the world
and the number is unfathomable. This is actually very tiring. It took
hundreds of years for you to connect your exhaustion with how
much you think about the bur oak. When you think about bur oaks
now sometimes you try to stop. If you look up there might be a
clothesline pinned with socks from end to end, or someone looking
out a window. There might be a question you want to ask your
mother. In the future, you might get to jump into the cold water of a
lake, or see your tall brother waving on the other side of automatic
doors at the airport. From time to time there is a glowing ache in
your thighs as you pedal a bicycle. This steals your attention from
the bur oak. Occasionally you sleep. Your dreams are nearly
indistinguishable and only once in this lifetime have you appeared
as the bur oak. Once or twice you have even stayed up all night
falling in love with a person and forgotten the bur oak completely.
I’ve been told it is quite common. A lot of people want to be a bur
oak. Sometimes this makes me cry and I sit down to cry. Crying is
not a standing thing. How does anyone cry unfolded like that?
Perhaps this is why I want to be the bur oak, always standing and
not the weeping willow, which is altogether too obvious a choice,
not that anyone really chooses to want this.
—
t. liem is the author of OBITS. (Coach House 2018). Her writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, Room Magazine, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, and elsewhere. She lives in Tio’Tia:ke / Montreal, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.