I could tell you I’ve been dreaming about tunnels but you’d say
that I’m playing the victim again.

I tell the doctor I’ve been having trouble sleeping
for about thirty-five years
plus a few centuries.

My colleague asks if there’s anywhere else
I could get citizenship in case, you know,
America, and I say, well,

every place I can claim to be from is at war
or staring down annihilation’s face.

Again my grandmother’s country wakes
to a red dot sight spreading into dawn.
She sent packages to the unnamed who stayed
till they were disappeared.
Where should I write that on my passport form?

No marks inscribe our graves but my fingers know
how to braid dough into twisted molecules,
know that it’s ready when it bounces back.

When I say cultural trauma you say I mean familial trauma,
so tell me which came first:

The pogroms or my grandfather’s hands around my father’s throat?

Tank tracks rutting the soft hills of a farm or my aunt
at the altar with a man who wouldn’t stop?

Clothes left swinging on the line as train doors close
on a bloodline or my mother
begging my father to drive back
so she can check the oven one last time?

Now my homeland is bleeding, dripped dry for political clout
or my homeland is Brooklyn and I’ve been priced out.

Now I’m sitting with my cousin in Denver,
we lean closer on her couch
till our wine glasses almost touch,
she says she’s never said
to anyone what she’s about to say.
I tell her I’m the same,
weaving lies into lives till I’ve lost the way
back to myself,
that we were born astray.

We put on red bikinis, sink and sway
in the hot tub, low resolution in the phantom steam.

And she’s here, isn’t she?
Our grandmother—she was sad wasn’t she?
But she loved to sing.

She was sad, wasn’t she?
But she’d love to see
us in one place for once,

still breathing this strange air.

The last time I saw her I clipped her fingernails.

 Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, Plume, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, CutBank, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from Emory University. She lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Franklin College.

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