What a thin, momentary
opening
everyone passes through, this I
tied to skin, this being between
two oblivions.
—“Made in California” by David Hernandez
***
Between two oblivions, there is the sea for certain
but it’s this body that forgets. Forgets what it was like to crawl
out from the water for the first time. Forgets what it was like
to be an echo, stirring in the lukewarm water and primordial yeast
before my body rose into the shape of a man
and asked for bread. As a child, I picked plums
with a rotten fist. Clenched them until the blood
ran from my knuckles and my hand was pale
as the hungering moon. The juice ran down my wrist
and the taste was sweet. But the pit, the shriveled
Adam’s apple of an old man, tasted of bitter
almonds. What life is there in the skin
stuck between naked teeth? I discarded
ancient seeds because the shell was hard
and I did not know the catalyst
that circles and binds the cracks.
When I see the roots of a tree bleed
through the ground, now I say they are the veins
of my grandmother’s hands, spilling upward.
I recall the tender bruises up and down her arms
and say I saw the sea rising through her skin.
My brother was young and far from the ocean
when he died. He overdosed on a couch
in a basement in Ohio. But I’ve seen footage
of him at Thousand Steps Beach. A wave
crashes into a foaming cloud. He dives
deep below the wake. The video cuts
before he can rise. When I look at the sea
he is still in it, swimming beneath the water.
When the tide peels the skin of the shore
I feel how the self condenses, how it explodes
into a faceless cloud. When I sit on the bluff
above Alamitos Beach, I stare at the ocean
and listen as my brother crashes against the sand.
He whispers there, at the edge between two oblivions,
that between life and death, there is only the shape
of a hand letting go. My fist ripens
into an open palm. I release the hoarded
pit of my devoured plum.
The seed rolls back and returns
to the womb of my first mother.
Photo by Ryan Stone on Unsplash
