Violet and Incommensurate
BY SYD WESTLEY
The length of my suffering
is the length of my arms.
At the end of my arms
are my two hands,
which are small,
scarred, and ugly.
I make things
with my hands, things
like poems, and I destroy
things with my hands,
like the mosquito
at my window, which
I’ve crushed and disposed
of with the rest of my trash.
Everyone want to compare
their suffering to mine,
theirs being more
beautiful or well-
behaved, like dogs at a
show with little red ribbons.
*
At the peace park
in Hiroshima,
there are shadows
burned into concrete
from the nuclear
blast. Suffering is
the size of the
shadows of the dead.
My family wasn’t
in Hiroshima
at the time of the
explosion. My family
was in America, safe,
in camps
in the Idaho desert
and the Oregon plains.
Elegy
BY SYD WESTLEY
At the Peace Park I find I can only understand death
in approximation:
I see a shadow. I imagine a body.
I hear a child. I imagine a history.
The sky is a long grey sea. Unending.
I am not in Japan but Pismo Beach.
Wednesday, fucked up, I didn’t think about death,
wanted to make out with all my friends.
Today is Trans Day of Remembrance. Memory
is a container, all the dead trans people stuffed inside.
All the dead trans people don’t care if you’re remembering them,
I think. They’re dead. But maybe that’s too cruel.
If not to memory, where do they go?
Waves lap at the shore.
Or a murmuration in the grey sky.
At the service, my father recreates my grandmother’s life:
her emigration from England, her hatred of America, her laughter.
She becomes more alive to me
as she becomes more dead.
My mother’s mother was interned during World War II in a camp called Minidoka.
When she died, I felt a whole history had enclosed itself.
When my father’s mother died, it felt different, less significant.
When Dylan died, my chest opened and I could not control the seams that split.
Of course, we can’t spend our entire lives in our heads,
in the past, even to resurrect those we love.
It’s better that my grandparents are dead. Better for me at least—
less guilt to bear.
Have we already established my cruelty?
I wish, in fact, I could be crueler to those I love.
My grandmother’s funeral is makeshift. My family, my girlfriend, my cousins,
my dog. Her house off a golf course on the California coast.
For hours I walk alone on the beach.
I smoke some weed to make the ghosts hospitable.
It doesn’t matter how I feel about them.
They’re here. Even the ones I do not know.
When I began transitioning, my mother began grieving
her eldest daughter.
Perhaps I sit among her parents,
among the ghosts of her mind.
Perhaps my ghosts too are my own creations.
I find ash in the hollow of my cheek.
Ash in the water. Ash in the air.
