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In a past life I was not defined by his death.
… I was not rerouted like a plane through
Charlotte.
… I was part of a “nuclear family,” the phrasing
of which appears first in 1924 as “the nuclear
family complex.”
… I did not have a complex.
… I smiled for the camera.
… Love accumulated like debt—mindless, habit-
forming.
… Similes were balanced equations.
… I had my father’s face, not “you have your
father’s face.”In a past life I am on the basketball court behind our
apartment
when I hear his footsteps on the asphalt.
(Does it count as a past life if it happened?)“In a past life” is not supposed to mean your life before tragedy
but an existence altogether unrecognizable,
which is maybe
the same thing: my having been a fir tree.In a past life the stanza above is nonsensical.
In a past life as a fir tree my identity was also pine.
In a past life that broke off from this one as I watched
a woman walk off of a plane before the doors
were armed, I almost followed her.In a past life as that woman, as someone who refused
to comply, as a passenger without baggage,
without a story
she answers to exclusively, no one would know
me.In a past life the allure is not who we were but who we are
not.
This Issue
April 4, 2024
Mourning Navalny
Sisyphus on the Street
The Way She Was