Una pregunta…

On Mayer and Notley, Donald Duck, dreams, adult diapers, and the only thing that is truly real.

Mucho trabajo, I say to M, Muy ocupada. Lo siento. I am so, so (so) sorry.

I am entering my virtual twice-weekly Spanish class. It is my first class back after a long hiatus—a refresher, and I kept confusing “p” words. Poner (to put), perder (to misplace), pedir (to ask), una pregunta (a question). They seemed related—the misplacing, forgetting, asking, needing.

At the end of class, I take screenshots of verbs I’ve worked on and forgotten, verbs I have yet to encounter, then proceed to bury the screenshots on my desktop with more screenshots.

Shortly before this class, I have a dream of my freshman year crush. This person who I don't think I've said a single word to in my life appears frequently in my dreams, dressed in head-to-toe Abercrombie or American Eagle or Aeropostale—a baseball cap they cup in their hands like a bird. They are forever shimmying across the front of Signora Ryan's class to their desk, and we are forever 15 and learning verbs in Italian.

A few hours after this class and this dream, I see my psychiatrist. She tells me it was the first time she’d seen me happy. I am buzzing with medication and wearing an adult diaper due to the enterovirus and talking about my incredible pain, but I am happy she thinks I seem happy.

I tell her it is “hope.”

Then, maybe, “the tan.”

In the midst of forgetting all my Spanish verbs and psychiatry appointment which ends with a hug and kiss on each cheek and work and writing toward workshops, Aoife graduates from her two-year-old class to the three-year-old class, Casa Niños. Despite my arms-length to-do list, when her school writes of a car parade, I drop it all.

Over WhatsApp I order in poorly translated Spanish, round globos paired with long and twisty globos that look like the chaotic squiggles floating over a confused Charlie Brown. The round and long and twisty balloons all wound tightly together like a fat bunch of grapes. Green and yellow and silver—rotten with color.

Wrapped around my wrists, I wait in the shopping center for an XL Uber to cart me and my adult diaper and loot home.

While I can’t make the actual parade, I get to see Aoife’s excitement captured on blurry film.

¡Eso! ¡Eso! she twirls in her twirly pom dress like a Disney princess under the awning of her school’s front entrance. Her niñera D and our neighbor Ana and her teacher blow party horns as she spins.

Her magic: their magic.

Her magic: mine, too.

*

I am close to finishing a project I started soon after my surgery. At least the impetus for writing it has petered out. There are now over 110 poems. None more than twenty lines. Some as few as two.

It features my poet self and doctors and insurance reps, my illness, an unnamed you, a painting I looked upon during my recovery, and a reality loosening at its seams, but Aoife: Aoife’s the star.

The only thing keeping my world still.

Or maybe the only thing keeping it spinning.

Fortuitously, while writing these poems, I have been taking the New York School: Second Wave with blush, and have found myself deep in the writing of Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley—mothers, both, who came to their children as archaeologists and mediums and, as The New Yorker once called Mayer, "field biologists."

The tiny beings in their poems—and mine—are not necessarily the stabilizing points of ever-mutating world. Instead, in a world that feels so very real, they are the only destabilizing force, and, therefore, the only thing that is truly real.

This week, I realized this, this is my current, working thesis.

Or, life code.

I’m not sure which.

Sections of Notley’s “January”—documenting her sons and their words—confirming what I know to be true:

Mommy what’s this fork doing?
What?
It’s being Donald Duck.
What could I eat this?
Eat what?
This cookie.
What do you mean?
What could I eat it?

The jacket is furniture.
I have to fix, Mommy.
I have to fix all the tools.

The flower says, we are purple,
together

Toward the end of the flower run in Notley’s “January,” in a world where a fork is not a fork, a chair not a chair, and purple is not simply a color, the speaker herself becomes the flower:

the light
makes me feel purple.
A petal is crumpling I’ve done
before
I sleep in the bulb.

Being purple is long.

Poner (to put), perder (to misplace), pedir (to ask), una pregunta (a question).

In a child’s world, like the poetry world, like the dream world: everything falling into everything else. And still, somehow, landing—a baseball cap cupped in hands like a bird.

*

Venga, mommy! Venga! Come! Aoife shouts.

We have cut the shriveling balloons off the car with a pair of kitchen scissors, and she is running about our tile floor diaper-less— kicking them with her bare feet, punching their pregnant bellies, toppling over them like a miniature ogre, wanting only me.

And, I think—happily, greedily, Yes. More. Please.

My daughter building the world around her, and I am somehow, incredibly, at its great, wobbling center. Me with my apologies and my pain and my hope and my adult diaper

This week in her world: strawberries are growing beneath my parents’ house and a ghost lives on the third story of our house.

This week: every girl with long dark hair is Ana—our neighbor—and every Ana has a sister named Elsa, and my sister, who lives in London with her short-haired Russian Blue Wesa, lives in the Santa Ana hills of Costa Rica. Her “Other Mimi” living in the hills, too.

This week: in the child's world, much like a poet's, a fork is a duck and a jacket is a piece of furniture and balloons morph into grapes and a hat is a bird and everything is simile and metaphor and inversion. A world not yet fixed, but exploded—and absolutely, gorgeously rotten.

And I am happy to steep in it.

To sleep in the bulb. To be a color that grows long.

With or without my tan.