The Double
BY WESTON MORROW
It was my uncle’s birthday.
We were meant to go place flowers
on his grave. But I was nine, and all I wanted
was to watch the Kingdome die
on TV—the implosion, building collapsing
into itself. Nothing grand about its end,
except maybe the dust,
whole clouds of it billowing up
to blot the midday sun, the remains
fanned out, cast in stone
like the fossilized hood
of some massive Cambrian jellyfish,
like a deflated circus tent, nostalgia
already rushing in to take its place.
I watch the demo now in reverse,
dome swelling like a popover,
sucking the billowing clouds of dust
inside, each row of blast caps
buttoning closed like a shirt, keep rewinding
past the beginning of the video—before
they scrapped the seats, peeled back the turf—
to ‘95, the Division Series, The Double, and Griffey
rounds home toward third, the ball leaves Edgar’s bat,
drawn back to Jack McDowell’s outstretched hand.
I don’t believe it. It just continues, Niehaus screams
on the radio broadcast. It just continues, and I keep
rewinding, before I was born in ‘91, before the fall
in Berlin, before the wall even went up, before the bomb
tests in the desert, before the chain reaction
of the cancer cells, and the dust
that blew downwind into my uncle’s lungs
is sucked back into the makeshift village at Trinity—
the proving grounds—where great men
like Oppenheimer and Fuchs tested
themselves against god at the expense
of children like my uncle. And so time
and time again we choose ourselves,
the feedback loop compounds, and history
repeats like the scratched CD
my sister plays in her room,
Stevie Nicks in Silver Springs, stuttering:
Time—Time—Time—never quite reaching
the rest. So we sit, mesmerized by destruction.
Our fathers go to the grave alone.
Creation Myth
BY WESTON MORROW
The story begins in the west
of Texas, beneath an unforgiving sun,
with a widower and his children,
three boys and a young daughter—
barely a toddler—the man’s favorite,
last reminder of his wife. In the story,
as my father tells it, she never gets
a name. So when she eats the night-
shade, he says, “the young girl’s death
drove the father mad with loss.”
He dropped the three boys off next door
and vanished. The young girl, the father…
this is how we talk about our own family
history, as if recounting a fable.
Three generations back, our knowledge stops.
This is not, right now, an indictment
of who receives a name, who doesn’t.
This is just a function of time, abandonment,
a catalog with half the items clipped.
There is no one left to remember
the young girl’s name, or her mother’s.
No one to remember how the brothers came
to Arizona, not exactly. I know the eldest son
rode west, paid to bring his siblings out,
and raised them; that he raised their children too
when the boys grew up and, like their dad,
couldn’t handle the pain that loving someone brought.
My grandpa Jack would speak of Uncle Ott
the way he used to speak, before his own son’s death,
of god. But no one talks about the others—
the father, the daughter, the younger brothers—
except in family lore, the myth we tell of origin.
An all-consuming flood, or Saturn devouring his son,
a little girl someone loved,
nameless, faceless, picking berries from a shrub:
all shadows at the edge of fire.
