I listen to my body
documenting the past on a stone cold tablet.
I let it sink into the silver lake.
On Christmas day, I flush my Prozac down the toilet, chisel my hair into a bob with a
butcher’s knife, and decide that I have been born again, without sin. I carve a tombstone out of
plywood, the surface splintering into snow. I set my voicemail box to say, the person you’re
trying to call has a voicemail that has not been set up yet, and Katy is dead. I search for a new name
so that no one can find me in the phone book.
Browsing a Bushwick cornerstone, I count the types of whole grain granola and spin all
the jam jars around so they are brandless. This is a grocery store performance piece.
I find symbols of the sun everywhere I look, the apartment walls painted gold.
Our shadows catch fire at dawn.
In my dreams, I see a baby riding a horse in a field of sunflowers.
In that granola aisle, I decide to change my name to Sky. Eliah says, yeah you should, and we
buy the package of butter with the two cows on it. Later, I hammer that butter box
above my bed to catch nightmares.
I think my name has always been Sky; I have just been called by another. My Catholic
mother named me after a saint, my grandmother, herself. I think a part of disowning my
crooked family of origin was disowning who I bent myself into to fit inside
their crooked front door.
Now, I stand before my Catholic mother
sweating out my sin.
I am sorry, but I was ruined by a man from a lake shimmering with silver.
I’m sorry I was never a good daughter.
I’ve never belonged to anyone.
I collect the silver specks and throw them into the sky–
the sky falls back down to bless me with my real name. In the morning, I meditate to the sound of my mother’s voice in my head.
Playing tic-tac-toe on the tiles of the ceiling before realizing that my mother had never really
spoken at all, her lips pulled shut by wire stitches.
Everyone carries around invisible mason jars
their emotional capacity filling up up up up.
They don’t touch me.
I am dirty.
I dream of my father and I sitting on that crumbling couch, watching all the class=”c8″>Final
Destination movies in succession. His fingers, crawling daddy-long-leg spiders. I decide never to sit down again. The couch is engulfed by ivy vines and fuzzy green moss in my absence.
The afternoon I am released from the children’s psych ward, he helps me paint the walls to a robin’s egg blue, covering up the murky greenish-brownish hue collected from the bottom of Carlyle Lake. The rapist from the silver park tells me that Carlyle Lake is actually
sixty-percent spilled beer. I don’t know if it’s true, but I picture the bottom of the murky
greenish-brownish lake littered with glass beer bottles that had fallen into a mosaic.
The last time I was in New York, I ate grilled cheese on Ginyssio’s bunk bed in BedStuy. That week I ate an entire jar of peanut butter and not much else. The three of us walked from the subway to the Whitney Biennial. The sky was clouded with confusion and absence of blue.
I am afraid I have fallen behind: lost in the maze of the Lower East Side.
I walk Gin’s drunk roommate home from the bar, but we get lost in the
maze of Bushwick’s apartments: all the fenced-in front stoops look the same. The windows with cages, the trees encircled by a pile of discarded plastic and orange netting. A stranger kisses me on the cheek without introducing himself first. My shock is lit under the neon signs of the late-night bodegas on Myrtle Avenue.
A man sees us approaching and pees on the sidewalk, right in front of us.
Gin tells me the first month after he moved to New York,
he rode the subway all night, using his olive-green backpack as a pillow.
The subway stops outside an apartment with a windowsill stacked to the brim with books, a layer of insulation blocking the outside world below, and I wonder if the owner’s read all of them.
As a child, if I awoke to the mini-van lurching forward in the garage, I let my body go limp and closed my eyes, pretending to be asleep again, so that my dad would take me out of my carseat and carry me inside.
Until my mother told him that I was pretending.
My days of floating down the hallway over my dad’s shoulder vanished.
Later, I played dead on the back porch, my eyes sewn shut while he screamed, pulling my limp body off the bench. I waited for him to slam the screen door before I called my high school art teacher and then, the police, while he looked for his gun.
In a nightmare, I follow the windy roadways of the mountains, cloaked in the obscurity of darkness. The gas gauge in my minivan is broken and has been for several years now; it gives no warning until the car is already slowing down on the side of the road. The limp legs of a dead body dangle off the bed of the pickup truck in front of me. The gas station lights are missing, and a man in overalls digs a grave behind the station, turning around with a shovel in his hand to watch my van crawl over the railroad tracks, sputtering and slowing to a gurgle.
I think I am underwater. The whole world is a dream.
I can’t sleep at night because my mother appears before me
her face carved from stone.
Monet rushes to wake me up every time I scream, but once I fall back asleep, my mother appears
again.
Sometimes, she stirs oatmeal on the stove, adding frozen blueberries that will thaw slightly
but taste like cold stars inside a warm puddle.
Sometimes, I am tied to the kitchen chair, the parents pulling out my baby teeth one by one.
Last winter, when I snuck back into my parents house to collect my winter coat and quilt,
I found a Ziploc bag of my baby teeth in a kitchen drawer.
I pressed them into the palm of my hand and ran.
In my dreams I can draw in the air with the brush of my hand. The lines form a prism
around me. I draw with the placement of objects like mattress springs and electric fans.
I am worried that time is dwindling
dwindling
dwindling
but I am working on slowing down. There is a memory that I work to keep contained: I have it written on a scrap of printer paper in my service dog’s vest pocket. Last night, I dreamt of large hands holding Neosporin and cried.
I dream that my parents’ German shepherd puppies freeze in their pen, lost under a pile of snow, the wooden fence around them not giving them enough warmth. But when spring arrives and the wild bluebells and Dutchman’s breeches bloom on the hillside, the puppies thaw and come out to play as if they had never known the cold. I too have been without a home in winter, my fingers turning into cherry popsicles, the whole world numb. In my dreams, I can’t open my eyes fully: I am blind to the truth. I live in a different reality.
I return to Silver Lake Park until my eyes boil over. The sky
turns from sky blue to sky-blue-pink.
The dewy grass poking out from underneath my fragmented body, the stars turn into airplanes while I call my roommate from the hospital to say,
“I think things are really, very bad right now,”
The landline phone cord curls around my neck. I don’t think to breathe. I’m worried
that I’m not worried at all.
My fingers paint patches of clover and “Thank you for keeping your park clean” signs
on my skin. I check for clues that the park is floating
in the hopes that I will wake up to a new memory of space.
My parents used to joke that they would name us Sky and Scuba because our last name sounds like diver, but they had too many children.
My name has come from familiar places.
I look up to his basement ceiling–and see stars appear amidst the wooden beams–trying to
pinpoint a different space, a chapter within me without pain
when he wasn’t stopping and I learned to stop crying out into the basement
blue
in the light of a DVD’s wits’ end.
There have been too many men, I’ve lost count.
I return to Silver Lake Park again.
I cry out for the stars to take me away from these flashbacks and into the sky.
The park’s slide is covered in silver dust.
The stars do not hear me.
A few weeks ago, I finally emailed my lyric essay to Erica Dawson. I waited until I was
so full of magic, my fingertips tingling with fire, my entire body radiating with magnetic energy
and my breath forming clouds of blue before me. Today, I plant my barefoot feet in the dewy
grass, connecting my soul to the earth. I exhale stale energy into the ground to be recycled. I
breathe up into my toes, translucent roots spiral underneath them. Lying with my chest to the
sun, allowing it to charge me with magnetic magic.
I am transforming via photosynthesis,
leaves sprouting from my ears,
a vervivan green.
I write to tell my little sister
with tears staining my cheeks
indigo.
I wasn’t born a saint–I was born a part of the sky.
A method actor armed with a typewriter, a mini van trembling with an unforeseen anxiety, and a
mind frozen in the past like a telepathic television screen — Sky Dai is an award winning poet
and creative non-fiction essayist who primarily works as an oil painter. Inspired by how
traumatic stress causes the brain to collage fragments of memory, Sky Dai rewrites their
narrative within a surreal dimension where traumatic memories become less distressing. They
identify as a queer, disabled, rainbow person, who is part of a dissociative system with a
service-dog side kick, Cloud Monet. Sky Dai and Monet have taught meditative movement
classes at School of the Alternative, been an artist-in-residence at Bunker Projects, and received
a BFA in fine arts and creative writing at Columbus College of Art and Design. When they’re
not reading tarot, painting on large canvases inside a tiny bedroom, or working on an organic
farm and eco co-op in Rhode Island, they’re probably watching scooby doo reruns and trying to
solve some mysteries.
Pronouns: they/them/we/us/ours