Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

After Dorothea Tanning

I move through the house my parents built. I am looking for the source of smoke. The house has many       doors. They stretch behind me—like a hallway of dark mirrors. At my feet, a little terror I call my pet. He doesn’t leave my side, so I name him Grief. I feed him scraps of meat I keep tucked between my        breasts, but he is never satisfied. We go to the kitchen first. Unwatered money plant over the sink  wilting for luck, pantry piled with expired cans of beans. The walls drip with yolk in places where, long ago, my mother threw them. Yellow pools smiling like happy suns against the laminate. Grief laps the edges, gets what he can. When I get to all the rooms where I tried to be worthy of love, I pick up the pace. Behind the room where my mother taught me the word “no,” a laundry room where, at eight, a neighbor’s son forced her to her knees. A few rooms down from that: the bedroom where I left the lesson. My mother out at the bodega, buying milk. When I find the room filled with my father’s language, it is almost empty. Only a lamp, flickering with the burst artery in my abuela’s head. A bird outside squawks: Speak English, lady. I shut the door, but the sound bleeds through. I rush down a vestibule hung with a warped Picasso poster of a hand clutching a bouquet, family photographs with faces I don’t recognize. I open the door to a room made for dancing where no one has ever danced. My father’s ventriloquist doll atop the piano, named for my dead abuelo. In this house, I am the only living thing left. Windowsills filled with my uncle’s cigarettes. By the door, bootstraps but no more boots. All around, piles of paper, a box labeled Shame. I rummage through, looking for the jutepouch that kept   my father’s cross, but instead pull out a manila envelope filled with baby teeth. At the center of the room: a hatch. I pry it open. Beneath, the bowels of the house stretch for what looks like miles. At the center: flame. I try to blow the candles out, but my lungs aren’t strong enough. I bribe Grief to join me and we huff and puff to no avail. Grief peers over the edge, widens his yellow eyes and I know I have to reach into the fold. I lean in, stretching as far as I can go. The fire chars my arm in circles, like a marshmallow on a stake. I shut the door. Grief passes me the match, already burnt. I swallow it and leave the house to smolder, carrying Grief out with me, tucked tight beneath my smoking arm.

								I remember
									I am 
								the flame

author pic here
 Nina C. Peláez  (www.ninapelaez.com) is a writer based in Maui, HI, where she is Associate Director for The Merwin Conservancy, the former home and 18-acre palm forest of poet W.S. Merwin. A Best New Poets and Best of the Net nominee, her work appears or is forthcoming in The Atlantic, The Poetry Foundation, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, The Offing, Rattle, Pleiades, and Electric Literature, among others. She has received Prairie Schooner's Glenna Luschei Award, Radar's Coniston Prize, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, and the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association/Gwenn A. Nusbaum Scholarship, with residencies, scholarships, and fellowships at Yaddo, Tin House, Tupelo Press, and Key West Literary Seminars, among others. She holds an MFA from Bennington College, mentors for The Adroit Journal, and is at work on her first book.


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