In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive Read online

  also by clementine von radics

  Mouthful of Forevers

  For Teenage Girls with Wild Ambitions and Trembling Hearts

  Contents

  part i

  part ii

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  About the author

  I’ve polished this anger and now it’s a knife.

  —Cathy Linh Che

  In the dream, I cut open my own arm

  and out poured a river that snaked its way

  through Oregon. Out poured each dead friend,

  now buried in the fall

  earth which smells always of rot.

  The blackberry stains,

  the unswallowed medicine,

  the face of each person I love

  and hope to never see again.

  Out poured each grief I have named

  and each grief there is no language for.

  In the dream, I saw a way to survive and I did.

  This is how I remember it. I lost a whole river.

  I stayed standing.

  part i

  The first time I knew

  I say to my best friend

  This love has become

  an endless game

  of cat and mouse.

  She says

  Baby, I love you

  But why are you always the mouse?

  Storm.

  The week

  after I found

  another woman’s fingerprints

  all over my home.

  After the storm

  of begging

  and bended knees

  had passed

  a tornado hit the coast of Oregon.

  The wind howling

  like it had something to grieve.

  Back home, a tree branch

  crashed through my mother’s window.

  and isn’t that how

  it always goes?

  You spend years building a home

  just to watch it destroyed in seconds.

  In the time it takes to say

  I’m sorry, I didn’t want you to

  find out

  like this,

  but she loves me.

  O,

  Love.

  Please convince me

  of the storm that grew

  between her mouth

  and yours.

  Convince me of its worth.

  Please, one last lie,

  I mean gift, I mean

  reason enough, please,

  convince me

  to forgive you.

  Now

  you speak

  and just like that

  there is a paintbrush in your hand.

  Just like that you paint this girl

  into all of our memories.

  You say I love you

  and she is forming the words

  and turning your neck.

  You say I’m sorry

  a howling thump unrelenting

  against my front door

  and she is kneeling beside you,

  uncurling your fist.

  There we are,

  sleeping in our bed.

  You reach for me

  tuck your body into mine

  and she stands in the corner.

  A graceless smirk. Sweet,

  thick, drenched in the truth.

  and wasn’t this always

  my worst fear?

  My love in glittering pieces all over the floor.

  My trust just another mess that ruins the carpet.

  Your girl,

  a madness haunting my home.

  She smiles

  and a bitter shroud

  falls across the bathroom mirror.

  She says your name

  and cockroaches crawl

  inside the walls.

  I tell you to leave

  and it is so cold here now.

  The wind

  keeps howling against my window

  over and over and

  over.

  As if to tell me

  one more thing

  I don’t want to hear.

  You apologize for your mistake.

  But the mistake was mine

  for trusting you.

  You apologize

  like I haven’t met a stranger

  on the train, followed them home,

  let them ruin my skin on the carpet.

  The question was in my mouth too,

  love,

  I just kept it there.

  For the last five nights I’ve had dreams

  about the woman he left me for.

  In these dreams,

  I am always scrambling to take care of her

  somehow. Offering her a warm meal,

  a soft blanket, a sturdy pair of shoes

  but of course, awake, I have done nothing

  or worse.

  When he said

  I made a mistake,

  let me try

  and come

  back to you

  I said

  Yes.

  I said

  Come.

  I said

  Leave her bed

  cold. Come home to me

  I will become the kind of woman

  who can forgive you.

  I said that.

  As if it could ever be that simple.

  There is a better version of this story

  where we both leave him.

  Instead of loving him so much it felt like church.

  Building a cathedral inside his crooked mouth.

  Tossing our crooked prayers inside.

  We are so alike, she and I.

  What do we know

  but devotion?

  She hates me now.

  And I respect her for it.

  At least one of us has the sense

  to stay the hero in her own story.

  To name someone the wolf

  in the parable.

  To take his teeth from him,

  leave their bloody business

  to my mouth. I asked for this

  after all, then asked for it

  again.

  I say your name,

  and the audience shifts in their seats.

  I say your name,

  and I’ve raised the dead.

  O you, reckless anarchist.

  Arsonist of our lives.

  I say your name and become

  the dead.

  This grief opens my mouth

  and speaks your name.

  Listen,

  to say it wasn’t all bad is the truth

  and a disservice to the truth.

  You, untamed flame.

  My whole face is a white flag.

  I’ll hold it up for you.

  Only you.

  The Fear

  All my friends are tired

  of knowing what it is

  I’m going to say

  before I say it.

  I am afraid

  I will love you forever

  and we will never be

  in the same room

  again.

>   I swear, next time I see you I’ll be funny.

  I will make jokes at my own expense,

  be charming as a surprise.

  I will ask about your new life

  and Be Cool About It

  and I will not mention Memphis.

  Or how your hair feels in my hands.

  I will not mention the last time I saw you.

  My mouth, so far from yours, I said

  I am afraid I will spend entire years

  trying not to need you.

  As if I wasn’t certain.

  As if this wasn’t my confession.

  Ever the optimist.

  He tells me he does not

  want to think about the past,

  only the future.

  What a short life the bullet has

  compared to the wound.

  What I would give

  to leave the past behind

  and have it stay there.

  Confession:

  By the time

  you gave me

  a diamond necklace,

  I loved it more

  than my own throat.

  Somewhere in Oregon a scattering of men

  are smiling despite what they have done.

  I pull their names out of my skin

  Like strange, poison strings.

  I lay them on my sheets and the bed opens

  like the mouth of the strange beast.

  Each bottle in my house starts to rattle.

  Everything I have ever buried

  eventually started to dance.

  Post-term.

  That winter I stopped being your wife

  and became a pregnant hollow.

  A swelling brood of

  Absence.

  Why ask so much of an empty heart,

  love?

  All the longing I do is for a dead thing.

  I open my mouth

  her hands fall out.

  To the protester outside of the clinic

  who called me a murderer:

  If I could have kept her, if she’d have been born a girl, I would have called her Jane. As in Austen. As in my sister’s middle name and my grandmother’s before her. I would have taught her to be kind. To be good. To love the Beach Boys even and especially after Brian got weird. I know you don’t want to hear this. Prefer to think me faceless and bloodstained, another statistic on cruel, thoughtless women. But like everyone else, this was never going to be my choice until it had to be. When I fought for the right to choose, I thought I was fighting for other people. Thought this right necessary but rough-edged. And ugly. And never for me. But that was before the missed blood. Before the days spent bent and gagging. Before the doctor said You’re about four weeks along. And why wasn’t I more careful? Didn’t I know what the medication I take can do to a baby? And that is how you and I met. Me walking into that clinic to do the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. You. Finding a hundred ways to call me a killer for it.

  Do you even remember my face?

  Because I can’t forget yours. I think of you. Constantly. Want to snatch the scream out of your mouth. Want to wrap my hand around your hand. Lower the sign that called me a killer. Tell you that my body was not a safe place for anyone. And even if it was, I wasn’t ready to love a person the way they deserve to be loved once you build them out of nothing but your body and promise to protect them forever. If I could have spoken to you that day I would have told you that the thing I want most in this life is to be a mother. But I know now that’s not true.

  The thing I want most in this life is to be a good mother.

  And I wasn’t ready. So I said goodbye. I thought that was the kind of thing a good mother would do.

  You are flying home today.

  Back to Portland,

  bringing your tongue

  and all of the ways it has left me shaking.

  Part of me does not want to pick you up

  from the airport. I want to picture you

  waiting at the arrivals gate for hours,

  watching an endless flight of passengers

  running toward tearful lovers.

  A flock of outstretched arms

  and none of them for you. You,

  standing there with a whole life’s

  worth of heavy shit and no one

  to help you carry it.

  This is a selfish hope,

  but what else do I have left to give

  You, coming home, bringing your faith

  in endless chances. You know

  all about my stupid heart

  and the place you hold inside it.

  I put it in all the poems,

  then put those poems down on paper,

  read them aloud to strangers,

  put them in books,

  sent those books around the world.

  I made news of my love,

  like I was flyering for a lost dog.

  Which, perhaps, I was.

  A conversation between

  my therapist

  and the mouth that sometimes belongs to me:

  Would you describe the mania

  as watching a bird die on your doorstep

  or the sensation of having wings?

  I want you to know the

  second time I went crazy

  there was no one to blame

  except my own soft burning

  brain.

  Why does calling yourself sick

  make you feel stronger?

  It doesn’t. I just believe my

  crooked truth and I don’t

  want it stolen from me. I

  have tasted colors you don’t

  even know about but I

  understand why it’s best

  to take such heroics away.

  I understand why

  people are better left unholy

  and on the ground.

  On a scale of a snowstorm

  to all the secrets of your womanhood

  laid cracked, exposed

  on the forest floor,

  boiled into a soup, used to nourish,

  how real would you say your hands are?

  I don’t sleep but when I do

  I dream of the Oregon Trail,

  thousands of strangers

  crossing mountains to steal

  the ground that became

  my home.

  Some of them passed with no

  trouble but I don’t think

  about them.

  When you divorce

  the idea of your body from your body

  what color is the escape velocity

  hurtling you toward

  the stomach of the universe?

  Don’t you think about

  the Donner Party?

  Doesn’t it bother you that

  children ate soup made

  from the legs of their dead

  father for the privilege

  of this land?

  What do you call the children

  of such a story?

  Let’s try and stay

  in this room. Now,

  if I were to crack your skull

  open how many Gods and

  Daughters and cockroaches

  would spring fully formed

  from your soft burning

  brain?

  Why am I always asked

  to describe my madness

  as though this condition was

  not the absence of reason

  and its language?

  What would you say to him

  if he were here right now?

  I want you to know

  when I buried the hatchet

  I gave it a proper funeral

  and everything.

  I think
we call this progress.

  But what do you call the

  children? Is this the way a

  wolf becomes a dog? Listen.

  There was once a terrible

  snow and I ate despite,

  I made soup from my own

  bones.

  His new girlfriend thinks I’m crazy.

  And I guess,

  for her sake

  I hope that she’s right.

  I hope the world unspools itself.

  restrings a new truth. Camel

  through the eye of a needle.

  I hope for her

  and her good heart

  that I and every girl

  who tried to warn me

  are just jealous.

  I hope the truth

  untruths itself

  and we all become liars.

  strung out Him-junkies

  angry to have lost our fix.

  Do it, girl.

  call us all liars

  while you call yourself lucky.

  Lord knows

  I sang that song for years.

  Lord knows

  it’s easier to love a smiling man

  than the woman between his teeth.

  Echo.

  There is a song by a band I can’t remember,

  but I know The Donnas covered it.

  When I said that I loved you,

  I meant that I’d love you forever.

  When I said that I loved you

  I’m not sure what I meant

  but know I meant it in the spirit

  of all great love songs:

  inexact, but with great feeling.

  Let me tell you about the future:

  There is no monument

  to your breaking jaw

  or all my different names

  for mending. and look,

  across a handful of rivers:

  you, on one knee.

  Her beautiful body

  growing children

  who do not have my eyes.

  Do you understand?

  All of this coming together and

  apart, our ever-gasping communion

  it’s just the echo of an old song.

  Or if it is not

  I’m still certain I cannot love you

  and forgive us your sins

  at the same time.

  I say all this but listen

  the record scratches

  the same moment

  asking the air

  for itself again.

  Bitter.