I.

If it were as simple as blood

on a doorway, or burying

runes in the backyard,

my father might have

made his claim on me

earlier, before the world

took to me like a graft,

soil and the microbial tribe

rearranging me. Law

is hard as stone, he thought,

but by then I was

a student of the moss.

II.

I’m truly not a child

of air, mint, and cello,

as Zagajewski wrote of himself,

but a child of background electricity.

Ferment on uncleaned floors.

A child of sickness and cassette tapes.

Yellow in the hospital.

Silence in the grandfather.

Dreambody in a dress

made of dirty stars.

Rhythm a matter of mood.

Surname virtual and red.

III.

  If my father were a mythic figure, some sub-god mostly forgotten in the great texts—pages burnt by our own people as twisted self-defense when the others came with crosses—

  I would find myself reinventing the ritual to call him forth. In taverns. In ice boxes. In the numerology of the city. In the non-player character’s unsettling speech. But no. I cannot reinvent my father by becoming a father myself. That would not be his way.

  I must become a ghost.

 

IV.

Lucky I’ve seen vines

growing in the compost.

Lucky I’ve been my own

sister some nights.

Lucky I’ve fed floodwaters

and underground economies,

thirty and three thousand mosquitoes,

six summer gardens,

and the sojourner moths.

Lucky the planet keeps the math.

V.

Some take chisels to their fathers.

They’re not wrong, except

the world is already

water and time

and nothing else.

Forget fire. Maybe I want

to be earth because

that’s the only way to swallow him.

Maybe the way is both

death and eros,

desire and ecology,

curve and cock, the name

and its forgetting,

vengeance and belonging,

satellite signal and static,

having a dad and having a city,

house and grave,

lover and losing your mind.

VI.

We are not Cartesians, our people.

When body and soul

don’t match up, we turn

to dream, drink, and casting

outwards like fishing or witchcraft.

I don’t blame him

for unbottling himself.

I think I’m supposed to.

But I get it. I too have felt

the generations echo

like red wings in a forbidden field,

have moved like another

searching for me in the caverns,

in the dancehalls, in the Doppler effect.

I too have felt my father

more present in death.

VII.

Going underground, we call it.

Hip-hop and politics,

rhizome and Russian dread,

crossing over to the elseworld.

Like I could finally find my name

in headphones, poems, and plant matter,

maps and scraps of language

my tongue knows better than my brain.

Like I could dredge myself forth,

mycelial, placental,

covered in earth-stuff and star,

and start again.