All right, all right I’ll go.”

“You know the way,” he adds,

laying a hairy hand on mine

and I glimpse behind his benign gaze

the face I know so well.

The reports say people jumped to certain death

when the jets rammed into the Twin Towers.

Rather than let death come to them,

they went to him,

their clothes billowing in the wind,

making them look like the kamikaze

in a fiery tailspin.

I kneel, staring at the altar,

trying to connect the dots of my life

and not getting anywhere,

as mother looks at me with a wolfish grin

and pinches my cheek,

encouraging me to repeat with her,

“The end.”

RELATIVITY

Mama says she was lost,

says she asked directions from my father

and doesn’t know how they ended up in bed,

or how they created a baby from one afternoon,

a chance meeting at a streetcar stop

in the Japanese neighborhood of Denver.

She was married.

When she told him she was pregnant with his child,

he said, “Go home to your family.”

The rest is history, is my story

and I don’t know how it ends,

but I hope it’s painless when it does,

unlike the end of their affair

which left her gasping for air

as he boarded the streetcar home

to his family and a deep sleep

untroubled by dreams of souls to keep,

but my mother was another story,

Catholic, seventeen and married,

abandoned by the man

she describes as being kind to her,

but how kind could he have been

when he left her to fend for herself,

left her at the top of the stairs,

where she calculated that a fall

might end it all

and sent herself tumbling down them,

only to realize when she came to at the hospital

that she had survived and so had the baby

that was growing inside her

like the truth she could not hide.

When she confessed to her husband, he beat her.

While he was out drinking,

she called her mother and father in Tucson.

They sent her uncle Bill

to take her back home.

She says Uncle and she rode the bus,

not talking until they were out of Colorado.

Uncle had cried when he saw her.

He was that way, you know.

He didn’t like women, they said,

he was one of those men,

but they didn’t hold that against him

so he was dispatched

to bring my mother and her bastard back.

The family decided that they could hide it all

by allowing everyone to think

I was the husband’s daughter.

They didn’t worry about the future,

or what that lie might mean to me.

On my birth certificate,

it says he’s my father,

but I always knew he wasn’t.

The two times I saw him,

I realized my mother was lying,

knew I was the daughter of another,

but I was afraid to ask her about it