I don’t want to start with the bullet or how you wanted to be president because he was or how in my dreams I can watch the wind surge clean from one side of your skull to the other or how I never wanted you to be president or how hope is its own kind of plague or trepanning or how round rooms make your mother dizzy or how often you forget she has her own knuckles or how trepanning means carving a door in the skull or entrances or broken windows or blood or how much white men hope a well-placed wound can solve or how nobody brings you to god or how only your mother goes to church or how she gripped her knuckles to marble praying or how when he got out of the car your mother clutched my shoulder into a string of bruises or how you have her face or how the skull is a round room or how he got out the car or hope or how I hid the bruises because each of them wore your face         I am saying you looked just like your mother when you were sixteen        you wanted to be president       in my dreams       you are already outside the car       when hope opens the wound       fills the whole round room with blood

TAXONOMY REGARDING MY MOTHER

First Mirror • Love Song on Low Volume • Country Where They Shower Beneath the Moon • Spine of a Rosary • Prayer in One-Part Harmony • Lottery Woman • Dawn Trickling Through the Blinds • Nation of Mourning Palms • Island of Two Countries • Sciatica’s Nervous Civil War • Child of a Rebellious Sea • Vitiligo’s Ravenous Bleach • Country where the Night Bathes You Best • Baptism • My Ignored Phone Call • My Translator for the Dying • My Ignored Text Message • Fistful of White Flags • Abuelita’s Pallbearer • Best Cook This Side of the Trujillo Regime • Candle in an Empty Cathedral • Silk Knuckles • Praying Hands • Moonlight Splintering My Father’s Palm • Love in the Time of Reagan • Here

I THINK EVERYBODY HAS A YEAR THEY NEVER REALLY LEAVE

If song is the yolk of grief, then a year is not dissimilar to a bruise. I come from a thread of tragic men mourning other tragic men. There are men I cannot touch when I need to and all of them are related to me. I am saying that once I was small and this is how I learned my father was going to die someday.

We were in the parking lot outside of Blockbuster; it was raining because I remember it raining; because I am always ready to conjure something to hide my father’s grief in. It must have been 2004 because every station was playing Dance with My Father on repeat. Luther Vandross had a stroke a month before and even the static wept. And there, to my left my father crying and my hands too small to fetch even a single tear.