Historical material 2020


There is a country I see on the internet
and in the street outside I see a country
there is also a country I see in my mind

I dream about this country more than anyone I ever loved
it looks just like a glowing constellation    exactly like God
I can talk to you about it like we are at a party,
even though it will feel wrong
but in the beginning I still always want to try

In my actual city, and in my real childhood
there was a dark narrow hallway
a kitchen where we played cards when the lights got shut off
my older brother could make real caramel over the gas flame
there were large transparent cockroaches behind the stove
pink and green dresses my parents bought me
from a couple who couldn’t keep them for their own daughter
I went to her closet to pick them out myself

My dad started a computer repair business just before the collapse of the soviet union
it was hard to make money in the 90s, 
and my dad was one of the only people in Odessa then to know how to do what he did
when he was little he and his friends used to catch and eat pigeons after school
I don’t know how old he was when he got his first gun

It always feels wrong to say the literal facts
in the 90s we were always missing that bullseye anyway
because I guess it turned out that not even a time like that
could make art about forests or love seem ridiculous –
at least not for the people we knew

People often ask why we moved,
but it wasn’t quite related to all this
I can’t tell you everything
I don’t know why, but I think partly 
because it would make too good a story
a Real Story
filled with geniuses and murderers, rapists and love
in your mind it will be turned into a popular TV show,
but the actors will not have these lines on their faces,
lines of loneliness and mental illness and the powerlessness of love
your parents and Jake’s never have those lines
I try not to see this
but actually more than anything they look to me
the way soviet people looked on propaganda posters in the thirties
like someone, someone else, lying
and I see I also look like that

There is a story I wish I could tell everyone, not just you
though I still don’t know how
about people who have to leave the world
and find out in middle age, after already living,
that everything is quite empty, and they just don’t exist
might never exist all the way again, nor their children
it makes you bored. and it makes you mean
and eventually you just learn to make peace with it, and enjoy things
because maybe it is actually better here
because eventually you grow up, and all those dead bodies and blank people,
that live in you like heavenly
lead, are not just a story anymore

When we moved to America,
my dad worked double shifts at a gas station
he also made hundreds of extra dollars a week by picking up lottery tickets
people hadn’t scratched carefully, and threw on the ground
I think in addition to that he would take electronic tags off stolen clothes
now he has a better job at a government lab. he thinks it is very cool
to you he is like a soviet cowboy, with all his guns, stories, and endless knowledge
I love him too for all that, despite what he was like to us then,
because a lot of time has gone by now, since the beginning;
he never could breathe well out of his nose after all those gas station years
and whenever I hear him trying to get air,
which is pretty funny sounding, I still think about Shell

and even now, when I look
at the scraped open eyes
of the comic actors
performing soviet state fairy tales
on the huge flatscreen in his TV room
I remember that my favorite book when I was six was monte christo
that I saw ten thousand gymnasts
fall like red flowers in the red square
for ten thousand red mays

that there was everything you could want
except maybe rock n roll

and so that is how
I ended up having my tenth
birthday at Chucky Cheese