my mother’s eyes came to brush my head 

 

 

my mother’s eyes came to brush my head 
they said, grow up well
wear clothes that fit
but time passed just by eating, sleeping
the future unfurled a denser smokescreen
I also wanted a fine pair of rainboots
bright enough to draw the eye of strangers
but time passed just by working, eating
I sweated two times
waited for nine redlights
and time passed me
when my mother came to brush my head I was feigning sleep
after she left I burned with fever
the sun was mad at me
fake moonlight fell from the cardboard moon 
I couldn’t recognize my mother’s hairbun
piled high in the bathtub

 

 

have you tried sweeping everyday 

 

I’m inclined to not speak and thus became a bird
I’m inclined to wear pants with holes
thus became a dog
those two cats became a circle
and must smell nice
every night I’m with my kid
and must stink
have you tried sweeping everyday 
you become more human
look     the sun has turned scarlet
look     that thing in the sea is seagrass
look     all gone

 

---

Emily Lu is a poet, translator, psychiatrist. She is the author of the chapbooks there is no wifi in the afterlife (San Press 2022) and Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press 2019). She lives in Toronto.

Numbers Upon Numbers

 

It’s a rehearsal for the end of the world,
I told myself.
But it has been the end
of many worlds.

They say two hundred died yesterday.
They say that at the end of this day
three hundred will have been,
four hundred may be gone tomorrow.

They talk about numbers
in a country
that lost its shudder.

Numbers upon numbers.
This is how we learned to add subtractions.

Since this hell started,
how many who used to have three meals a day
now have only one?

They are not figures; they are biographies.
If your name were inside the next sad number
you would count it differently,
you know it.

It’s a rehearsal for the end of the world,
I told myself.
But it has been the end
of many worlds.

 

The Land of Whispers

What does it mean to put these words together?
Talk to the moon, invite the wolves
walk barefoot in the rain
awaiting the next storm
ask the atheists the name of their god.

You know by hearsay
the map of the land of whispers.
Which, as you know, only gets one lost.
What does it mean to put these words together?

It would be better to start a collection of silences.

 

Wanderers

Systole, diastole
and diaspora,
movements of a distant heart.
The track’s rails
in an ancient town
kiss the passage of a train
that is leaving.

That is leaving.

 

---

Maurice Rodriguez is a writer and translator originally from Connecticut. He is now based in New York City where he is an Editorial Fellow with A Public Space. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and an MA in English from UConn. He is also an adjunct professor of writing across various universities. His work has appeared in HASH, Puerto del Sol, and ANMLY, and was selected for Deep Vellum‘s inaugural 2024 Best Literary Translations anthology.

     for Amy

Do you capitalize phobias? Do you capitalize job titles when they’re attached to people? You capitalize the shorthand of a degree but not the degree spelled out. At my job we leave out the Oxford Comma, which sometimes gets us into trouble when it comes to clarity and always gets us into trouble when we leave the comma in there and forget to take it out, and our boss strikes through it. How do you spell the phobia with the gross holes. I’ve never Googled it because I don’t want to risk seeing images. A friend once warned me never to do so. I’ve tried every variation I can think of, in Microsoft Word, but they all come up wrong. Maybe Word doesn’t know that phobia. Or maybe it has that fear, too. Every variation I try has that line under it: red, squiggly, foreboding failure. Having a fear of birds is called ornithophobia. I know this because I Googled it. Do you capitalize phobias. 

Untitled

1.

but last night, a moth kissed my forehead
while i slept—

        & its wings were soft
        & so my dreams were softened.

dreams of silverfish
& paper chewed to pulp.

        dreams of turning
        the pillow over.

2.

but last night, you slept
        beside me

&, as a moth, 
        kissed my forehead.

3.

i see your wings
                in daylight

pressed into your back.

my love, 
        blue moth-prince

my dreams were thorns
& nails.

 

Insomnia

unrelenting nightmare       velvet
& pale asters       a quiet grammar
the silver twine woven 
around my heart & lungs

evaporated midnight cloud
blood cardinal willow branch
confessions of an absent god
confessions        of a god-hunter

this savage garden        of baby’s breath
& thorns     hogweed & oleander
catmint       strangling
all other roots

my sleep       the dominion of blue ether
my pillowcase        black with ink

 

Self Portrait as Comfy Mattress

1

the heft of a deflating ribcage, those graceful sweeps of bone protecting what is vital & soft

2

how the first blades of sunlight can caress a stirring cheek & bad dreams burn away as rose-orange beams lay kisses upon the eyes

3

in lieu of a lover’s arms, I offer you pillows & blankets. a neck held gently by something firm

4

yet, a loneliness dwells there still. before bed, dahlias almost erupted from your chest

5

you were waiting for correspondence from someone thousands of miles away, someone who awakens to air saturated with another ocean’s salt

6

why love a person who dwells beside distant water

7

how a single text can scythe away wildflowers threatening to overtake

8 

the heart

9

in dim lamplight, you placed the phone facedown on the floor. breathed
three quick breaths before glancing in its direction. it didn’t shudder 
or make a sound. you’ve grown too old for magical thinking 

10

they love me, they love me not

11

chanted the trespassing flowers

12

there were your thoughts: spiraling through the dim lit bedroom

13 

while streetlamps blazed & peered into your window. your room is on the third floor of some house

14

& you love this house—the languid years you’ve lived here—but birds & tall structures know nothing of privacy

15

you’d prefer to spiral in private

16

&, before bed, there was no new text. nothing sharp to prevent green stems

17

from rising up from the crypt of your anxiety: 

18

a strange pressure in the skull. no pain, just a deeper attention
to how the body can sometimes be a trap. the need for food & touch, the neverending
needs of flesh. it was 1 am that saved

19

you. eyelids shut by no will of your own. sleep arrived like the plucked feathers of geese

20

& I held you while you slept

Lights Collapsing in the Tunnel We Go So Fast Through

 

The halogen flashes we go fast

We go and go and still we are not next to each other 
We’ve been all over the country together
and every place we’re farther from us

 

I wish love were obvious and not
this painful twig we hold between us
bending till it’s two twigs

 

Cataract

My cat’s eye’s gone gloss and tired. Mirror face. 
The marionette of light she kept bouncing 
in her skull has turned dull. She whines

at the end of the hallway for a door but won’t
come through one, and don’t we feel each of us
wanders behind a smoked up lens, deficient love
and clarity forsaken us. I watch the first snow

come onto winter and steam the glass, unfortunate. 
The flakes discern themselves against the weather.
The bird’s flight can be traced to an individual feather,
but we can’t find it. The cancer comes from one cigarette.

I don’t know how the ash goes melt on my palm.
What’s in me? What if there’s a fire in here and I can’t
get out. We’ve nailed the screens shut. My cat
scratches the kitchen tile to find her bowl, but it’s gone.

 

The Bull

In her violence she was almost a person
With withering hands and a tent in the wind
Snapped its poles in the Wyoming storm
And flung its stakes near enough to pierce the ground again

And her love walked up and over the wide boulders 
and past the glittering ground quartz (come up from where 
the earth had been opened by time)
And down by the stream where an angry bull
Was protecting his herd of women 

And the cows feared the strong wind and ran spooked deeper 
into the ravine where the man stood frightened and full of 
strong beer and the robot cried in her old Jeep missing him

It is the wind again which will carry the sharp things
And the wind pushed the 18 wheelers to sway like leaves 
in the wind and the wind which brought the lover back to her 

And when it calmed he cooked beef ribs over the fire and 
they played old music and did not speak
And the bull walked past a few times huffing
And far away a hawk cried but you could hear it 

While the ranch was quiet and the kindling cracked 
Somewhere there was a predator
The bones of snakes were everywhere and the clavicle of a deer 

 

Words in the genocide

 
There are no words for this, we repeat.
I think about this instead of the dead.
The brain matter. The reddened kids.
There have never been more words.
In English, and Arabic: a thousand
novels, a hundred thousand poems,
decades of song, laws days-long,
a thesis stack that can reach the sun.
What if I told you the reader is moved
not at all? The listener laughs, draped
in a mangled woman’s wedding dress.
No doubt the Times would edit her out—
the original woman, the marriage, the flesh.
Murderers wear their victim’s clothes
in desecrated homes, grinning.
I can’t think of a better description
for Zionism. Killing my love of drag
is the least of its crimes. I think
about the seamstresses, and tailors.
The careful measurements.
Months of labor, the elegance
of knuckles, an art meant to be
recorded from every angle to stun
even the future. How they worked
their whole lives to be in the picture.
How we work just as hard not to be.
Like the times, I edit us out of frame.

 

Park in the genocide

Any dark man with a beard
Could be me I have learned
From my son’s urgent delight,
How he rushes to love them.
Dear fathers afraid to smile
Do you know he is yours, too?
He doesn’t know you
Could be a danger and I
Fear to teach him where joy
Must be tempered. As a boy
I ran from everyone, everywhere,
With good reason. What reason
Holds you at bay, dear fathers?
Is it a memory or a fear,
Is it yours or was it given—
Is there a difference, Baba?
I look around at the sum of us
And count all the flinches.

 

Protest in the genocide

How will I get you, my loneliest eye, to love
Another? Oh, let me define it for you then,
The precise process of divine arrival—
It’s not so much a fall as an expulsion
Out of self, into the ache of world
Where even a breath can flay
Your spirit, yet still you inhale 
To know the air between us,
How much more alive we can be
When we breathe together. Love is both
The path toward devastation, and the means
By which we survive it. What are you
Waiting for? Leap! You are alone in yourself! 
Leap! There is more to this life! Even to death—
Yes, leap! For your husband and your wife
For your friend and your child, for the river
And the sea, for the stranger you can’t see
And the day you might not meet—leap!

 

Oversight

 

It was December and the orange leaves of the water oak all faced the ground identically, as of hawks. I held vigil over a thousand living mice. There were rainbowed braids of wire and oil derricks behind the paintings in the museum. I curled my tail around my body—its uneven distribution among the snow and flowerbanks. Data swam, gasping into the practice space. And I staggered through the boroughs, sharing needles with dockworkers on bedrolls in cat food factories. The little matchstick flame shivered thousandfold in the metal bins and assemblages. Triangles of people held my attention. Puzzled by silence, stillness, I occupied cat’s cradles of bus routes and reverb. I stroked carafes and wanted to get fucked again, as copper thieves spoke lovingly to fences in the inner southeast. My two-dimensional urn: I carried it everywhere. I licked my eyes awake. At protests I studied curious waveform patterns, observed a fiveness of quadrants and a squaring of ovals. I followed myself on Twitter. I googled “cat food factory.” When the leaves began to fall I straightened my tie and googled “cat food factory near me.”

 

Atavistic Reflections on Home Improvement

 

None of the cabinet doors
in my home stay open without human
intervention. This equates to fewer

than two moments before the future
shuts open. I was briefly there,
long enough to learn that all good

things are assembled slowly.
It was similar to the way
you don’t know if you have a head

-light out until you confront yourself
in the smudged plate glass window
of a gas station when you pull up

to wait in idle for the dealer.
I’ll find out soon, when winter taps
its reflex hammer, whether the speed

of sound can warm me. 
Until then I’ll keep moving
the canned goods from cabinet

to stomach, where they slow
dissolve into a maudlin montage
of naps. It’s cute—until you realize

sleep is just the passing recognition
that the leaves this time of year
somehow rise before they fall

into the ancient pattern.

 

An Abundance of Caution 

 

Suddenly the flight attendants were in their parkas. 
They put the accentless pilot on the PA to inform us of the emergency. 
When we landed the ladder trucks were there to greet us.

The fleet of ambulances shuttled back 
to their hangars with silent flashing lights 
that were impossible not to read as disappointed.

I took the airtrain to work in the city and stopped to watch a woman 
pet the plate glass of the flower shop window. The cat behind the glass 
arched against her hand. The boxwood smell was a voice

no one else in the children’s park could hear. I must become comfortable,
I shouted into the telephone, with what I do not understand in order to live. 
Like the wolf tree, I was after a piece of the sky. 

When I was a child I warded off disaster by remembering 
I am not special. Who, I asked myself when the dark quilt 
of prairie erupted with the blue lamps of windows TVs and parking lots,

do you think you are? I dislike my job, I often have nothing to do.
Not even the sweetbitter of envelope gum to keep company with,
not even a transom window. The spell no longer functions, 

the spell functions in reverse. Who do you think you are to be immune? 
Under the condemned bridge they have hung a mesh barrier. 
It protects the river and the men on it from lost hammers or loose stones. 

I said I love you and held both your hands in both my hands while the plane 
descended, rapidly. No one else seemed frightened, they continued 
to watch the news. Remember the gorilla behind her plexiglass at the zoo,

curled on her side, sleeping with her back to us?
Stroking her shoulder with her hand, comforting herself, her fingernails 
so tidy I could imagine her hand was my own. In the office kitchenette 

no one wants to hear  about the emergency landing. The safety mesh 
full of hammers full of stones like a t-shirt hem lifted to carry wild strawberries.
I admit it, I wish to be understood. I spin like the microwave’s grooved glass plate.

I hum, like the microwave’s bright box, the dreaming gorilla, I hum.

 

 

Nameless Ridge

 

I peel my last orange under the sugar 
locusts plush with thorns, press 

to the high-tension line’s false summit. 
Thumb into the fruit’s luxurious clutch 

of bruises. It is easier to walk a mountain with a name,
even a mountain named Nameless. I left a smear 

where I passed. The oft-palmed sapling 
at the switchback’s elbow and the switchback’s nonsense 

script itself, the branch I snapped when I followed
foxfire, mistaking it for my language. 

I am certain flying is as tiring as walking. 
Still, I’m jealous of the songbirds who thread

the buckthorns’ glossy snarl with precise imagination.
Where their bodies begin and end, nothing more. 

I have tired of description, carrying 
both myself and what I observe. The desire 

to describe become the unwanted wedding guest 
in a gaudy dress and the gaudy dress itself, cumbersome 

with riotous light. The berries on their thorny vine, their endless
plucked and gimlet eyes. I stumbled as I climbed

because my self was everywhere on the mountain. 
Like perfume my feelings walked 

ahead of me and behind. With the self and her desires 
came the knowledge of the end of the world 

and the end of beauty as I have known and named it. 
The lake of pines the pruning fingertip 

of the tarn in the coming storm. Because I was there, 
my mind was, I dropped impossibility’s barbed seeds

all over the earth. Oh mama, 
I do not want to live in the sky anymore.

 

 

It’s hard having been
a plague, all swarm and plunder:

nobody texts you to make plans 
for happy hour, nobody asks 

if you’ve had a good day
or if you fidget from hunger. 

Even plagues desire company 
from time to time. In retirement

from my status as a plague 
of locusts, I am now the absence 

of a plague of locusts. 
Sometimes I hear a buzzing 

and think friends! But it’s just 
the memory of how I used to 

make music. I had a song once
and it made the crops weep 

but filled me with sky. 
Stranger, I need you to 

tell me if there is forgiveness 
for former plagues 

in your system of ethics. 
I need you to tell me 

if my wings could 
sound beauty, not famine.   

 

                                                         the dream that my door
won’t lock 
                        & my patient is dying
                                                              I only studied
bio in college  
                                    dropped chem                 a night class 

the phone rings it’s my sister the doctor
                                                                            she wonders
                                          what to do 

about mamá
                          ten years dead this October
                                                            has cancer what options
do we have

in the U.S. alone, 1,132,206 people have died 
                                                           of a much-denied virus
hospitals overwhelmed
                                         an American thing         this denial

                                                                          did you know 
in some countries people rent 
                        graves ten to twenty years in the Netherlands
                   three years in Greece                     grave diggers 

pray the bodies 
                            have skeletonized before raising the bones 

my siblings and I buried mamá’s 
                                            ashes in my eldest 
                                                                  sister’s yard along 

                     with some wild                                
flower seeds
                                 I don’t know if they’ve bloomed yet

                                                                   papá once insisted 

                                                    his be buried with mamá’s 
now he says he doesn’t 
                                        remember 

                                                          her          he remembers
                                    his paramour
                                                              the love of his life (?)
the one he never
                          threw down the stairs

I want to ask a pastor
what it means
                                              to honor one’s father
                                                              ask my father’s sister

in the dream someone’s stolen 
                                                my dining room 
                                                                          table 
nothing left but decayed 
                      floorboards and a couple
of holes

           to walk means to fall through a gap      
                                between the floor and the ceiling below 

                                                                                 my sister  
calls again wants to know 
                                        what to do about mamá 
                                                                        ten years dead 
                       and has cancer

 

The distorted cat will follow under the door, 
Above the rug, and float like a scent 
You’ve never smelled 

Though sure that others smell it too. 
It’s sweet. It had eaten the grass, 
Had a sore throat, and lied flat,
Like a thick towel on the bed
Where you are headed sick,

Not a stray, not owned by you,
Totally free in your house, 
The town, and the world.

 

              My great-grandfather was named Martin and when he got to a certain age—somewhere after sixty but no one can say for sure now—he had to be locked up in the back bedroom of the house. He was mean and he would yell and beat on people. Martin died long before I was born. I’ve heard stories about his cruelty. I wonder, often, if I look like him in any way. I wonder if I’ll become cruel in my old age. Fate, it would seem, has always felt like a carrion bird to me. The word carrion has such a negative connotation for some, but for those who understand the importance of vultures, it sounds beautiful. In the case of my family, it is hard to find beauty in the face of fate. 

              My grandfather, Martin’s son, presses his own shotgun shells. When he lived with his third wife, their garage was full of rows of presses. Boxes of lead pellets and red or blue plastic casings were neatly organized around them. On the other side of the garage, there were rows of Christmas villages. Reality split evenly: shotgun shells and the charm of domesticity. The presses sit in the garage of my childhood home now, lined up in a row. Even now, I remember the movement of making bullets. 

              My father says we have a family curse: no matter how badly you might want something good to happen to you, no matter how badly you want happiness, you’ll never have it. He says that’s just the way it is. 

 

              In December of 1898, John Henry Patterson sought to engineer the Uganda railway which would run through present-day Kenya. Before the railway could be finished, two male Tsavo lions killed and consumed thirty-five workers. Patterson, a former tiger hunter, took the responsibility of killing the “man-eaters,” construction on the railway stopped for several weeks before Patterson could shoot the lions. In his 1907 memoir, he writes, “their man-stalking so well-timed and so certain of success that the workmen firmly believed that they were not real animals at all, but devils in lions’ shape.” 

              The lions typically struck in the nighttime. Patterson writes, “at about midnight, the lion suddenly put its head in at the open tent door and seized someone—who happened to be nearest the opening—by the throat.” The man begged the lion to let go and tried to wrap his arms around the lion’s neck. After the man’s death, one of his fellow workers asked, was he not fighting a lion? That question stuck between my ribs, imagining when my father would be pulled out of bed late at night. Faced with certain death if the gun went off and yet he fought instead.  

              Sometime after my youngest uncle was born, my grandfather began to wake his children up with a shotgun aimed at their faces. My father and his older brother were the ones who had to wrestle the gun away. My dad says his younger brother is too young to remember it. When I ask, that’s all he’ll say: He was a baby, he doesn’t know the half of it. 

 

              Patterson wrote about how the lions had an “uncanny” ability to slip away, always near midnight, whenever he would stake out with his hunting party. Armed with guns and goats, he would hide in areas where the lions were known to kill or were spotted. Each time, silence would fall over the camp, and, in the distance, Patterson could hear the cries of the men in the camp as the lions attacked. They knew when he was away. 

              It is said the lions knocked men off their donkeys, pulled them off trains, and even leaped onto tents, smashing them. Once they decided to take a man, nothing would prevent them from doing so, “shots, shouting and firebrands they alike held in derision.” A hiccup in the gene pool gave them jaws that closed around the lives of men like an inescapable sickness. 

              Patterson instructed the men to build tall, thorn fencing around their camp. For a while, it worked. But despite every precaution, “the lions would not be denied, and men continued to disappear.” They found ways beneath, above, or around the fencing. Estimates of their death toll do not include the deaths no one knows about. The number of thirty-five is the number of men consumed. Not men attacked, not men killed, and not those left to die. No one knows the true number of the dead, but it is believed to be in the hundreds. 

              Before my father was my father, he tore down houses with his dad. From the time he was thirteen, he had a job. He followed his father from abandoned houses to condemned buildings, always tearing them down. In photographs, my father has a baby face. Nothing at all like the coal-black beard and hair I know. He’s covered in soot and dirt, standing between his father and an uncle. Smiling. Out of the four siblings, all three boys became ironworkers. They all picked a profession that required sparks, soot, and pain. 

              Being part of this family, I’ve gathered, is much like being a plow horse. Retiring when the weight of the plow and its sharp edges are too much. Only to become a trail-riding horse, carrying the weight of other people. Nothing good. Only hard work. 

              The first lion to be killed by Patterson, once shot, measured nine feet and eight inches long from nose to tip of tail. It took the strength of eight men to carry its body back to camp. It took ten shots to kill the second lion. 

              The Ghost and The Darkness, as the workers called them, live behind a glass case now. Scientists still study the skulls and teeth of the lions. Trying to ascertain a true number and a true cause for their killings. The only way to make sense of the uncanny is to explain it. They have many theories as to why the lions ate humans. Some think they had severe dental damage or  they were accustomed to the bodies of men left behind by caravans carrying enslaved people. Some of the men were practicing Hindus and created funeral pyres for their dead, something scientists suggest could have attracted the lions. They keep trying to find a definitive answer. Identify the causation of the killings, number the bullets, count the teeth, and someday you will have an answer. Someday you will understand. 

 

              If you asked me what my relationship with my father is like, I would tell you about the time we were passing a football around in the backyard and his throw landed in my face. I would tell you how bad it hurt, how the tears were instant. I say instant because, normally, I would not have cried in front of him. He was devastated his daughter wasn’t a volleyball player or a softball pitcher. I would tell you the only thing he said to me after that was to stop crying like a girl. 

              I should tell you my father loves dogs. Every dog we’ve ever had has loved him too. When he comes home from work, he often walks through the door and says, “Where’s my girl? Where’s my baby girl?” When I was born, my parents both had Rottweilers. Greta and Bear both belonged to my parents prior to their marriage. I grew up with them. My mother tells me often now how much she and my father loved those dogs. How they wanted to have more of them, but having children changed their plans. 

              One evening, Bear got tangled in his chain, tied out in the yard. Someone tried to help him get loose but got bit in the process. The way I remember the story is that the man demanded the dog be put down. 

              My father took Bear outside and shot him. 

              I’ve never asked, but I know the place where the dog was shot must be where our storage building is now. Sometimes, if I think about it and close my eyes, I can see that spot of land before a building stood there. Bear is buried in the hollow where all of our dogs are buried. My dad says he’ll never do it again. He says he would never shoot a dog again, even if his life depended on it. 

              As a graduate student, living states away from my father, I drove to Chicago to see the lions in the Field Museum. Two maneless, male lions. Their paws and heads were larger than I imagined they would be. When I went to the museum, I looked at the maneaters in wonder. I felt as though the lions were always calling for me to see them, like we were meant to meet. Like I was meant to understand something after seeing them. 

              Now, I believe that those lions are a sadness. The maneaters live behind glass and were it not for a Michael Douglas movie, they would be forgotten. 

              Worse still, was the fact that there was a display of a mother lion and her cubs. Meaning a lioness and her cubs died. Their fate isn’t listed on the case—they weren’t violent like their male counterparts. They ended up in the glass boxes at the same museum. I came to Chicago without knowing the mother lion and her cubs were even there. But now I think about the small, hand-sized cubs often. They must have weighed nothing in life and now even less in death. 

              When my mother was nine months pregnant with me, my uncle held my father at knifepoint. He held a knife to his throat and his then-wife yelled at my mother. Do something! My mother looked at her, her hands folded over her stomach, over me, and said no. He doesn’t know I know this story. When he held the knife to his brother’s throat, he was eighteen. He didn’t know who I was. He couldn’t have guessed I would ever know about that moment. But I was in the room with them. I always have been.

              When my father was a teenager, he held his father at gunpoint. No one remembers why and he doesn’t know that I know this story. All my mother said was that he changed his mind and thought better of it; he put the gun down. 

              When I was around the age of five, the same uncle made a visit to our house to take the guns away. He took away every single gun in the house, because my mother thought my father was going to kill himself and maybe even us. If I was five, my brother would have been a newborn. 

              I don’t remember this story; I only know I was there. 

 

              The state of Ohio used to have no laws or regulations about the ownership of exotic animals. It was, in fact, a hot spot for animal auctions, a wild Midwest. Tim Harrison, a retired animal control officer is one of the people who got the calls about tigers in basements or vipers in garages. In Zanesville, you didn’t have to go to Asia to see a tiger. You didn’t even have to go to the zoo. 

              In the earliest years of Tim’s career, the animals had nowhere to go. A lioness named Tabitha ended up living with Tim for that reason. Lions reach the age of sexual maturity at around three to four years old. Before that deadline, Tabitha stayed in the house. Whenever she roared, the sound rattled the windows of the house. 

              After a lion reaches the age of sexual maturity, instincts kick in. An ancient need to be the leader drives the cat to dominance, to violence. This isn’t “turning.” Lions and tigers are born to hunt and kill. Even if they live in a house in rural Ohio, instinct cannot be replaced or removed. 

              The lion will fight to assert dominance. To prove they are the ruler of the family, the center. Just like tigers living in basements, pacing back and forth. They know on a cellular level what is and what is not wild, what should and should not be. At an animal sanctuary in upstate Indiana, the tour guide told me the animals remember the people who abused them. A baboon has lived there for fifteen years but because of whatever her owner did to her, she never bonded with another animal or human. Sometimes, when they move her to her outdoor exhibit, she pulls the grass up by the root and throws it. 

              When I interviewed Tim, he said the animals experience trauma the same way we do. It changes their brain, their body even. But they can’t tell you in our words how it feels. Tigers make a specific sound when they feel happy. It’s a sound deep in the back of the throat reminiscent of an exhaust pipe on an old truck. At the sanctuary, when the tour guide comes, some of the tigers walk up to him and they make that sound. Over and over again. The guide says if an animal makes it to their facility, it means they’ll be there for the rest of their life. They got out of their toxic homes, out of the basements in Ohio, and roadside attractions in Texas. Now they live better lives, not quite free, but sometimes happily. 

              On October 18th, 2011, a man in Ohio named Terry Thompson let fifty-six exotic animals out of their cages. Forty-nine of the animals were “put down” on the spot: eighteen Bengal tigers, seventeen lions, six black bears, two grizzly bears, three mountain lions, two wolves, and one baboon. Prior to their release, Terry was sentenced to prison for illegally selling guns. He told the judge if he went to prison, his first act as a free man would be killing himself. But only after he let his animals loose. 

              When the news broke of the animals being shot and buried, I was a freshman in high school. I remember saying, “it really is a zoo over there in Ohio.” The bodies of the animals were buried on site, at Terry’s home, even though officials were warned the animals were worth more dead. The black market thrives on the selling of pieces of exotic animals. Terry’s wife left town with some of the surviving animals. I wonder what her new life must be like, free of a gun-running husband. I wonder if she ever thinks about the deaths of forty-nine animals. 

              I can’t remember what my father said, even though that was the biggest thing to happen in the tri-state area for a long time. It would have still been the biggest news story for years to come, until a family was murdered execution-style in their Kentucky home. We didn’t talk about guns or violence in our home, but we always talked about animals. 

              I watched the story of Terry Brumfield play out in a documentary. I was twenty the first time I watched it and I return to it often. Terry lived in Ohio. Across the river, as I would have said, the river which separates my home from his. In the film, he’s introduced as a man who owns two large, African lions. 

              Lambert, the male lion, and Lacey, the female. Two lions bought off of a friend after a trucking accident left Terry disabled. With every appearance, I felt endeared to him. After a second viewing of the film, I realized why. Terry Brumfield’s hair and bear-like looks are akin to my father’s. His voice, and his work ethic, all matched my father’s. 

              In the film, Tim Harrison offers to help Terry with his lions. They have been living in a horse trailer after an accident caused Lambert to chase cars down the interstate before he was captured and brought home again. As Terry speaks, he tells Tim about a time when he thought local law enforcement would take Lambert away.

              He said do you remember that thing that happened down in Waco, Texas? Well, if you try to take my lions, what I’ll do won’t even compare to that. That was when I knew whatever cloth my father had been cut from, Terry came from it too. He wouldn’t start it, but if his lions were lost, he would certainly finish it. 

              Over the course of filming, a freak accident involving an electric current kills Lambert. He was five years old and weighed over five hundred pounds. Terry, with camera in hand, lies on the ground petting the lion as he takes his last breath. Terry cries I’m done, I’m done. 

              Tears always welled in my eyes when I thought of Terry. He was a stranger I felt I knew, a stranger I know. The lions, he said, brought him out of a deep depression. They gave his life a purpose he had never known before. He cried in the film, something my father rarely ever did. The love he felt so deeply for Lacey and Lambert was the kind of love I always wanted my father to have for me. It felt so strange to be so envious of a dead lion, so envious of all the dogs we had when I was growing up. It also felt like one of the deepest sadnesses I have ever known.

              Terry buried Lambert on his property at home and agreed to give Lacey and her cubs up. He became a champion for legislation that would change the way people interact with animals. He began writing a book about his life with the lions. His pain was twisted into purpose, not swallowed or echoed. 

              Shortly after the release of the film, Terry died in a car accident right outside of his home. When the paramedics arrived, Tim said, they found him lying on top of Lambert’s grave. Terry is now buried with Lambert. When I read about his burial in a local newspaper, I cried. It felt like losing a chance to meet someone I had grown fond of. Then it became a reminder: someday my father would die, and I may never know him well at all. We may never be bonded or endeared to each other the way Lambert and Terry were. 

              When my father was a child, my grandmother swears there was a mountain lion that lived in the woods behind their house. When they talk about this lion, they call it “her.” My grandmother says her because the lion never bothered the children or the dogs, a supposed gentleness. Now, I marvel at this. Gentleness is still somehow wild but feminine all the same. Whereas masculinity is violent. They saw her often and heard her even more often. My grandmother told me if I ever saw a big cat, I should run. You better run faster than it can. You never want to be caught alone with the cold clip of claws and death. 

              Once when we were camping, I heard one. I was sleeping in a small tent with my younger cousin. The sound was a woman screaming for her life. It had been so silent then, like a crack of lightning, all silence and safety was lost. Fear kept me from crying out. Then my uncle talked to us from his own tent. He said to be still and not to worry. I can’t remember if we held our breath, but I’m certain we thought it couldn’t hurt. I trusted what he said. He survived a lion when he was a child and through him, we would do the same. 

              Eventually, we fell asleep. 

 

              Tigers kept in unfit conditions are prone to having ingrown claws and decaying teeth. They are found with urine burns on their skin too, from the inability to escape their own waste. Once, in Ohio, a building caught fire, and a tiger jumped out of a window. No one had known it was even there, but when the flames began to lick the home, it leaped. A tiger, in the wild, can consume up to a hundred pounds of a carcass in one sitting. In an American basement, the best they’ll get is frozen chicken or a dead deer. 

              People with money buy exotic animals for show, breeding, and trading. They do it because they can. Isn’t that the way most bodily violence happens anyway? Because you can. In one case, a young girl set out to play with a family friend’s “pet” tiger. The cat swatted at her head in play, and it broke her neck instantly. 

              My neighbors have a ceramic, white tiger on their porch. The color white is a genetic hiccup for tigers. Once in the wild, a cub was born white, and someone stole it. Now white tigers are inbred for their color. Those tigers have the potential to suffer from a multitude of pains. Some have spines that never grow past their hips, so they can’t use their back legs. Nearly every white tiger has crossed eyes. The thing that makes them beautiful—that sets them apart from their brethren—kills them. I often wonder how heavy the ceramic tiger is, if I could steal it, and then how badly would the neighbors miss it. Then later, I think of the math—the statistics really—and wonder if they have a tiger in their basement. 

              Our grandmother kept water guns in her garage. The biggest one, a Super Soaker, belonged to my youngest uncle. When we would have a water gunfight, he would always hide in plain sight. Except, it never seemed that way. Armed with smaller guns, we would run and aim for each other. The entire time knowing he was somewhere. Waiting. Then, as if he were a shadow all along, he would turn to face us and chase us down. He would empty the entire tank of the gun in your face, while we laughed and ran. My father, during a similar fight, was sitting on the roof of the house with a bucket of water. Like his brother, no one knew to look for him in places like that. No one noticed until it was too late. They knew where we were, and what ammunition we carried, and they soaked us to the bone every time. 

              One Halloween, I snuck around the side of the house to scare my dad. When the heavy door swung open, I yelled BOO! And watched my father’s hands smash into a fist and saw his arm pull back. When he saw that it was me, he shook his head. Later, my mother said you scared him. You’re lucky he didn’t punch you. I thought it was odd that in our family luck did not equal wealth or laughter, it meant not getting punched. 

              Shortly after that, my grandfather contracted cancer and got divorced. My dad, always so committed to his father, couldn’t let him suffer. So my grandfather came to live with us. He too would resort to swinging when afraid. He lived with us for fourteen years before I moved out. Even now, when it’s time for dinner, we yell from across the room. We motion with our hands, pretending to scoop a spoonful of food into our mouths. This is the safest way to get his attention. This is how we are lucky. 

              When I was twenty-three, my brother got into an argument with our father in the driveway. My father taunted him and dared him to throw a punch. They fought until one of them ended up on the ground. My mother and grandmother pulled them apart. After it was over, my father said to his son you’re lucky your mom was there. 

              I knew, without asking, that this was not the first time my grandmother had separated a fight between father and son. 

              My uncle, on the day I graduated college, told me to leave and never return. When I was eighteen and upset after a fight with my father, the same uncle provided me solace. My father followed me and yelled and cursed. I hid in my uncle’s garage; when my father finally left, my uncle came to talk to me. He had been building a shelf and wood shavings were everywhere. He sat across from me. 

              He said I had to work hard to graduate, to leave. I was the first one in the family to do that, so it meant more. This was what made me stand out from the rest of the family. I was the hiccup in the family line, at least I was trying so hard to be. He said I had to look at my father as an example and decide to be better than that. Decide not to hit my kids or yell or be distant or curse like that or seethe. I had to learn to forget. 

              In all the books I’ve read about trauma, psychologists have discussed how trauma lives in the body. Strangely, how trauma travels through bloodlines and rears its ugly head in many ways. I poured over these books in the same way the scientists pour themselves over the teeth of the Tsavo lions. I’m trying to explain the uncanny to myself. Up until now, the uncanny could not be explained. This haunts me, knowing I may never know. 

              When I started college, I began to have intense night terrors. Sometimes waking up screaming and crying. Sometimes waking up standing in the kitchen and having no idea how I got there. When you have a night terror, everything seems and feels real. Like it would if you opened your eyes. However, something sinister will be waiting. Sometimes, I’ve seen people sitting on my chest or standing at the foot of my bed. More often than not, I don’t remember what happened. I only know I wake up and I’ll be sitting up in bed and sobbing so hard that I question if it’s even possible to cry any longer, any harder. 

              While being diagnosed with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, I talked a lot about my symptoms with my mother. She had a hard time understanding how it could be possible for me to have such a disorder. Like everyone else in my family, she overlooked the history. She missed the forest for the trees. I still have night terrors when I’m excessively tired or stressed out. I have long accepted that it is simply my reality. When I stay in foreign places for work trips, I create walls of pillows around me and I stay up as long as I can. I worry that it’ll happen and the person in the next room will wake up in terror too. Although I had accepted it, I had never thought much of it. Until I learned my father would wake up with a gun shoved in his face. Then I understood. 

              After my father assaulted my mother, the police officer responding to the call had them standing apart from each other in the driveway. The officer was loud and perhaps shaped that way. He yelled a lot and assumed a lot. My mother explained she is separated from my father and has been for years, but didn’t divorce because she has kids and needs health insurance. 

              The officer looked at me and said, “She’s an adult, so that’s solved.”

              For the rest of my life, I will always think of that man and think how lovely it must be to not understand what a legacy of pain was. He kept his thumbs hooked into his belt, next to his gun. 

              He asked, “What can we do tonight about what just happened?” 

              Unable to hold it back, I started to cry and said, “Officer, he has a history of aggression and abuse.” Meaning: Officer, if you do nothing and you keep yelling at us, he’ll think the behavior is okay. He’ll eat us. He’ll put us in a big, glass container so everyone can stare at what’s left. You have to reprimand him, you have to tell him if he ever does it again, he’ll go to jail. 

              My dad spent the night somewhere else that day. I don’t remember where. In the years to come, he would cheat on my mother. He would break my heart so many times over that it felt as natural as breathing—as pacing. I’ve tried to understand it in the only way I can: Through the lens of what is wild. Instinct. I count backward and find there are three generations of violence alive in me. Rather than flounder in the revelation, I’ve thought about it like this: I’ve transitioned from the basement of someone’s house to living in a sanctuary. I’ll never be the same but I’ll be free. I wish my father could see it that way.