martin

it was snowing the day i figured it out.
you were driving us somewhere
and the darkness
was just as grim as the feelings in my body
scream-shouting about the water rising
to my ankles. where are we going?
why aren’t we floating yet? this flood.
this fucking car.
i’ve been in this season before but i know we’re about
to drown, there’s no way we’ll be able to get to jenpeg, and may i ask — is that where we’re going?
but i recognize the swell of impatience in your jaw. see,
my auntie used to have to keep me when my parents
couldn’t have me for whatever reason.
we’d fall asleep together on a double bed in whatever apartment
and in the morning when the alarm rang
she would roll over and click her jaw and mutter blearily, accusing:
you grind your teeth at night. it’s so fuckin’ loud.
and i couldn’t even apologize because it was something i
didn’t know i was doing and didn’t know how to stop,
but now that i’m older i want to say
i’m sorry that i kept you awake.
i’m sorry that i do these little things.
the radio alarm clock she had
would play chtm

shitty morning traffic
i would lie
dazed and half-awake

for my turn in the cold rain — 
in the half-darkness, wishing i knew why everyone hated me so much and all the time.
the adult knows how to skip over certain scenes
and avoid conversations, so i always thought maybe
she knew and didn’t say it to save her the time.
i always thought
they were trying to save themselves from something.

skip over me, over my head.

but back to this car and our drowning.
i don’t know how to stop this because i have also been
seeing it in the stars, that it has to be you or me.
pluto was a planet once — 
can you imagine what kind of wildness it takes
to be decommissioned so soon after your
discovery? is this why when we see each other it’s
hard feelings, the kind of shit they
talk about pluto doing? our love contaminated by the signature of unconscious
power dynamics and nuclear scares.
i can’t disavow a whole sphere of the world so quickly, it’s my job to
know there are several dimensions existing at once.
i think of pluto and i know there is a place
where i’m at the wheel
and drinking shit coffee from a warped mug
telling you the shootout would’ve been a faster death.
surely there is one where the pandemic never brought
any of us within a miles’ radius of each other
and i’m long dead, ashed out on my mom’s tv stand.

do you understand me when i say this:
i knew it was going to be hard from the beginning.
and that isn't to say i don't want to learn your language, forgive me, i am not telling you that
you are too far away and too foreign for me.
i am saying this long-winded because when i curl
my toes into the current below us as we drive down
highway six i
want to distract you from how much less i know you
the more i try to understand.

that was the ego talking, the stupid traumatized part of me
that thinks we have to be the same.
i love you sincerely. i love you more.
even in the places we don’t align we make sense. and it’s not that i
lose you when i look harder at you.

it’s that my body mimes something like an earthquake when i’m near you

all these fault lines collide

all these worlds slip on top of another —

i am of course
going to lay with you in this bed
and grind my teeth
at night and not know why,
but tomorrow will be different because i will wake up and know.
in another life somewhere you devastated me
with the same enthusiasm you have when you
take my hand in yours and gruffly say

the water’s cold

as though it’s an apology.

the water’s almost up to our knees now but it’s too god damn late,

this is the nelson river all over again.
this is autumn freeze. with my other eyes, i see the hand on my cheek
and how sorry you are, i superimpose them so i don’t feel
so lacking. there is something to be said about
fatherhood and all of the easy, simple ways men tend
to fuck these things up.

can i tell you about this life? can i tell you
about the letter i found from 2003 where
he blames me
and tells all of his friends how angry he is
and my mother tells him,
in this letter,
she says
you work on this shit or you get out of the house i bought for us.
i don’t think we were that bad,
but it’s the same kind of thing. one of us is blocking
the other from an objective. it doesn’t matter if you
instinctually curl yourself around my pain and
know it more intimately than i do.
that’s the job of a parent. that is the least you could do.

but you’re not my father here and
that’s just a dream i once had and
i tell you that i am confused, that i don’t know
what to see you as. do you see me from where you are,
in the driver’s seat? in your periphery? is it enough to
be witnessed for who i am when all i see is the imprint
i made on you that i can hardly understand?
there’s so little i can do from the passenger seat.
all i can do is hope you know what world you’re driving us to.