After we board the plane,
my father tells me about a time
he robbed someone’s house. He was fifteen,
and he and his friend had just dropped the family
at the airport. A favor. They went back, grabbed what they could,
but when they were carrying the tv set across the driveway,
a neighbor spotted them, so they threw it in the air and ran.
It’s always like this with my dad, these little anecdotes,
breadcrumbs, or ashes, they are scattered like either,
and just when I think there is no story I haven’t heard,
another ushers forward from his lips. Or
we are suddenly inside of one, like the last time he visited,
showed up at my house with a gun he found in a hotel room.
Don’t worry, this gun doesn’t go off inside of this poem,
instead he spends several days dismantling it and
leaving pieces in garbage cans around the city.
When the hotel calls and asks if he found anything unusual,
he lies. He revises. One less gun in the world, and now, his deed good.
The father’s history is always a revisionist history.
Which means mine is, too. What difference does it make
if I am a Russian Jew or Ukrainian Jew, he asks, reminding me
the borders are always changing. He might be dying, the cancer
isn’t very far along, but he’s refusing treatment.
He promises he’ll let us know either way. Of course he’ll know.
We are waiting on the tarmac for a storm to pass.
I haven’t seen my husband in four days and I’m tired.
The plane shakes against the gate, an old horse in a stable,
like the one my dad built in the garage when I was five
for the horse he bought us for Christmas
giant bow on its bridal, clomping around the tree Christmas morning.
We were the kind of Jews that celebrated Santa Claus.
The horse died of constipation, mostly neglected
after he spooked and bucked my sister, her only injury,
a dark smudge in her story leaving that small fear of failure,
the same my siblings all share—
every poem has its own truth, and so, too, does memory.
All of us running always, trying to stay ahead of the story,
hooves on the ground, televisions in the air.
–
Elizabeth Joy Levinson is a high school biology teacher in Chicago. Her work has appeared in Whale Road Review, SWWIM, One Art, The Shore, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She is the author of a full-length collection, Uncomfortable Ecologies, available from Unsolicited Press, as well as three chapbooks: Thigmonasty (Ghost City Press), Running Aground (Finishing Line Press) & As Wild Animals (Dancing Girl Press).