Caroline Cabrera

In middle school when we watched a video
on mummification in history class, surprisingly
only one boy vomited, as they mimed pulling
the mummy’s brain out through his nostril
with a hook. The other children teased him
for years. I cannot even remember his name.
At night I sometimes wish to discard my brain,
its tender mash, the way it conjures my father,
his nodding face and the slope of his shoulders.
I wake and my father has called. We talk normal.
When I think Prussian blue, I imagine my house
wallpapered in a shirt my father owned when I
was a child. I picture stitching myself
a pair of pants and holding a small baby
against my lap. I want the streets to become
an ocean of that shirt. At hide and seek,
I hid in his dry cleaning, the way some children
bury themselves in leaves. I love my father.
Babies love my father. And cats. Sometimes
I hold my father too long, and then it is
my sister’s turn to hold my father.
At my quietest I only want my parents
to visit my neighborhood and look out
at the Front Range, white-capped against
a blue blue sky. At my quietest I only want.

I want to walk into every finality knowing
that the dark in me is crisp enough for a body
to ping against it without it rippling. Men stare
into me as into a reflecting pool. I wish a spindled
hand could reach from my core and wring necks
while I continue sipping my iced tea unperturbed.
The hatred I grow is born of experience and stoked
by the tiresome effort to simply move through
the world, my body intact. From birth every
element a malfunction, even my given voice
a malfunction, owing mostly to its sounding
often or at all. I imagine burning through
the soft atmosphere surrounding us but
find the heat in my hands is a trick, a pain
I learned to use, a cold-hot handful of ice.