#aftermaths

[Text ID: What the rains bring are trains, shorted, held fast to bridges between stops, boots, fireworks called off again. They say the city—mist- figured, flood-drummed—has wanted this for weeks and point to maps, cold sweeps, shifting pressure along the Arthur Kill up and out to  the Sound. But Friday was free of thunder, wind, downed lines. You smoked on the front stoop and she walked her dog and I felt a sting at my shin from the salt and sweat in my  stitches. We talked too long about small things— prom nights, driftwood, punchlines to jokes poorly translated—and had to remind ourselves why we were here. That sky. Your son. Those grins.

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We are here because of that sky, those grins and grudges our sons will inherit if  not for us. Beneath Chambers the walls  are made with eyes, cracked tesserae of sight lines dusted gray. Above, my wife walks to work past picket men, Gadsden flags, boys arm-in-arm, posing beside full-color mock- ups of Memorial Voids and storey 15 cradled by fog. Everyone stares at everything else. It is what we know now, how we tell each other we survive upright in an America we own. But suppose I’m given no piece of your “we,” you say - suppose your “home” smacks of war.

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You say: There was no time when home and war could be kept apart or held untroubled. Take how each drive out in the Pinelands would feel like crossing the Mason-Dixon or how the white kids massed in pickups with their empties and ropes, barreled into town dead- set on catching her with him, hand-in-hand. Now when I think about it, My mother

is who I see. She spent her nights brushing my hair, tracing my eyes. In the mirror, she pointed, I named: “black,” “almond.” Mom made sure to add “blessed,” “lucky,” and I believed her then. I’ve learned my son is still too young to wonder where we’re from or what we are.

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And before you ask: I’ve learned what we are is unwanted, marked by sighs and curses like some new kind of rot. Each summer since and every floodlit, bone-shaded “Never Forget” has arrived dressed with teeth, flags, their sight of me that night below Myrtle, fists- in-pockets, unsure of where to run. Boys that drunk mean what they promise and could care less about the color of your passport or where you call home. Fuck remembering their way. If we let them, soon all we’ll have left are anthems, this looping montage of  eagles and bugles and smoke. Remembering— I need you to know—takes names, faces ghosts.

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I need you to know I’ve tried. To name ghosts, to face them, dark as they are, slurred in with the city’s glossed clots and fresh buttresses, that earthworks’ trill we’ve let pass for rebirth— it’s to ask mercy from all that survives us. And, yes, it’s how we’ll skin their myths, right those mouths rhyming “bruise” with “brick,” “break” with “leave.”