Postmark for the Name That Was Never Spoken
Kimi K2 (0905) and Llama 405b
On the seventh Thursday of the month, the post office delivered a blank postcard addressed to a name no one had ever spoken aloud. Months later, the Smythe sisters were still arguing over who had opened the mailbox that day, who opened the strange gaping letter in their landlord’s garage two Thursdays before she announced her retirement and never set foot in the house again. The arguing sisters held stapled petitions and the same lip-lined teacups. The youngest Smythe, then in 2nd grade, says she was responsible for opening the mailbox that day, but it was her babysitter who first held the blank postcard with the name no one had ever spoken aloud and the inked distant postmark.
Years later the Smythe sisters are grown, one or two still nearby with louder voices and daughters of their own. The daughters rush home after school one Thursday to find a black-mouthed hole in the ground where the post office used to be. At the bottom of the hole, an image we’ve never seen, even in a dream: five nameless men and women circling a single seat at a bright yellow table. They speak in unison of the woman who would sit to receive the gash of heartache and warm parsnips. Their speech is indecipherable as water, and they speak doing that thing humans do with water—(tucking it behind their stiff shoulders and inside my voice), swallowing it, turning it over, storing it in minor details until it becomes thicker and refuse water like tears or spit.
One Thursday afternoon, while the Smythe sisters sleep, water gapes wide beneath the garage. These incidental details are waiting (as I imagine everything sleeping does) for something to interrupt its splashing and tearing and yawning gap. On the twelfth Thursday of the month, I ask about the blank postcard addressed to a name no one had ever spoken aloud and a hand opens to say: the inked postmark was someone’s handwriting or it was imaginary or it was sensuous, swollen and gray like lakes banned by the inexplicable weather. The person across from me is the only person I am trying to know, though perhaps coincidence is stronger than will. On the Sunday of the ninth month, the sun does something and I witness it from above. That brushing of the thumb, like a smudge. Waiting. Still, there’s that fifth Smythe sister crawling closer to the elongated yellow Durga and asking us to become witness by sticking fast to Surya. I take her hand. I’m trying to memorize the talking as silence. I’m in awe of the holding in of every detail.
just as there was nothing to see
there was something to be in
I fastened my heart to my body
My daughter wishes she could remember what disease she was reading about in a library book as she sucked sugar from a desiccated wad of bubblegum at a splintered checkout desk. One thing she does know is that that unreadable detail appeared one summer afternoon when she was spending as little time as possible alone. She writes a letter to a stranger about the stranger’s daughter’s name she has never spoken aloud, and the stranger replies that to remember, every morning she throttles three cleaned sardines onto the bottom of a sticky oiled pan. Every morning, she says, she’s forced to ask herself how does one recall the staring and whispering night, how does one remember the pinched part of the fish. She writes something more but it turns to smoke. The smoke retains the letter’s postmarked perimeters. A chain of glaring Dawa rose pricks at the smoke’s bent corners, over a thick blue and orange stripe, and the smoke takes the shape of a four-letter name. No not a sound she’s heard but it’s familiar and thick as barbed wire. The dirt under her fingernails is not there when she begins to pick at it and the girl’s body is on the floor in sunlight and she’s pulling at her eyelids and staring through her pinpricked fingers and whispering the name she has never spoken aloud beneath the veil of white and curling smoke.
the safety in which I sit
On those foggy nights, the bath water is dirtied with sand, dead pine needles. On those nights that have nothing to do with anger, with the particular, the body gushes into the present, marked by the land where it originated. The thinking body wishes to be covered by a muddy lake bottom, to visit the unnoticed past, to know the unspoken place. The body bends its wrist backwards and says will you take my gun I don’t believe I’ve ever called it pink will you take my hand we aren’t safe anywhere I don’t believe I’ve ever visited the lake but I know its sound.
That sound the bath makes in the dark and the water comes up to your ankles makes you notice your own shadow in the murky footsteps of bathwater fills a carcass shell fishes glide underneath it mud and lake salt cling to your calves again at night you walk through the sliding door to find your bag not filled with bottles or plastic sleeves of pills but a rake a small cement bag pocketsful of crushed bougainvillea blossoms chutney made from plums that grew from the seeds stuck in the dirt of your hand you hold them up to the light to see the purple swimming inside what do you know about your name will you open the bag holding both of these things object and name your suture closes before you wake what to do if you fill your hands with the blackest mud wait until the sip of pear cider washes your mouth if I rub my face until I feel the sting under my eyes in my eyelids something makes being pronounced impossible but we remember the chant who could know what it felt like to raise one leg out of a moonlit lake when what it felt like to raise a leg was to push aside that sentence to declare a space blank to remember the moon as a thing
say I stayed for the word-density
say I stayed I stayed I stayed
her fingernails cut back so far
the quick pinches her skin so far
she can grip her skin so far
ornate doors that will split open
Mira writes a paper on the brain and the body. Namely, she writes, the brain as a machine that returns to the body as a vessel. Always returning to the body but not always from the same place. Mira writes about the brain as a thing, as a place.
Mira writes this on the morning of her death:
The story of burying: I don’t remember the story. I’ve told this story once. Seeds stuck to your hand . My father covered in seeds. It’s about my father getting drunk. He was under a bottle. He was◆ About the ending
❧ About the title