After "Spring Letter from the South" by Keetje Kuipers
Mother, you should see this place.
It’s as if when God created the Earth,
he knew we would destroy it, so, last minute,
he penciled in paradise on the edge
to remind us what we’d taken for granted.
We never talk about them anymore,
my sister and her son—your daughter and your grandson.
I guess there is just so much we can say
after nine years have passed. There’s no one
new to blame. No new memories.
Only old questions.
I look up and the rustling palm trees remind me
how much distance there is between us.
Between you and I, mother, between what is lost
and what is surrendered.
Between their last hours on Earth and this hour.
Between us and everything unknown to us.
I am wearing a sun hat speckled with strawberries
because I want to be ready for joy.
But will I recognize it when it comes?
Would you recognize me without this sorrow?
You would not approve of this place, mother,
with its pride flags everywhere, its dewy, tan women
in spandex rollerblading down the boardwalk,
shirtless men on bikes, blasting music with foul language.
I haven’t seen a single church on Miami Beach.
No Costco either, for that matter. I don’t know
what you would do here, mother,
in a town with no church and no Costco.
Since they died, you’ve gotten worse, going to one or both
every day instead of a few times a week. Now, you need
to know where I am every minute.
I come up the driveway and before I put the car in park,
you are standing in front of me, waiting.
There’s a movie that takes place here in Miami—
The Birdcage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane.
At the end, there’s a scene where everyone dresses in drag
and hides in a gay nightclub to avoid being recognized.
I imagine you and I there together, in stilettos and wigs
dancing to ABBA or Sister Sledge. When I think of joy,
I think of you and I pretending to be other people.
When I was growing up you always told me
that your mother sent you money from Korea
because you were her favorite. What I have come
to understand is that your mother, my grandmother,
understood how limited you are. She understood
that if she did not take care of you, that we—
you, my sister & I—may not survive.
Mother, it is spring in Miami.
The flowers are abundant and their perfume
is dizzying and lascivious. People are coming up
from the beach with wet hair and sunburns and
jazz is playing nearby. I am sitting on a bench
off Ocean Drive in my strawberry hat and later
I’ll buy overpriced gelato as the sun sets in this world
and I’ll wonder if there is a sun wherever they are now.
I’m drawing us all from memory—how we looked
the year they died. I’m drawing us in drag on the dance floor,
mom. I’m leaving room for paradise.
