by Yano Ism
i.
I will say goodbye in German while you hold my laughter like currency and step out into a spruce forest in Sweden.
You will be confused by the crêpe I hand you since we're no longer in our Parisian apartment. We're on a beach in Croatia. The ice-cream is melting between folds of wheat and browned sugar, between fingers and the grains of sand whipped by the wind.
You are daylight and you're dimming because you see your father now. See him as a patina encased copper statue in a town square in Riga. Your Danish-blond sister is crying in the rearview, no longer glorious, no longer anything but the grime under her nails, haunted by apparitions of men she's dug up from the trenches.
I dream of you in lavender hues but think of you in stanzas from Rilke poems. Recalling your propensity to hollow every man of substance; strip him down to charcoal markings on a canvas you abandon in Rome.
If we ever make love, let me devour you like you do them. Greet me ripe with the promise of friction and pressure, crimson stains, and taut sinews. Let me leave only your imprint behind.
ii.
My grandmother's irises are blue from macular degeneration, now a joke we share in your family's throne room. Now as familiar as knäckebröd, and liquorice candy, herring, and Kalle's caviar.
I see her in national museums, her hair depleted of melanin, resembling the portraits of your pompous monarchs. She's a pop-artist's muse in Fotografiska, a tenured housewife demonstrating the first vacuum cleaner, a voguish nymph.
She facilitates each smile as I guess myself out of points during Trivia Night. You love to say I out sing your family on road trips, forgetting I only know those songs because she was Mogadishu's disco queen.
Tell me again about daylight, about how it differs from city to city, latitude and longitude, as you hold a sheet of paper to the sky, and I'll pretend I'm not looking at the passersby.
I'll pretend I'm listening when you say you love me, and maybe you can tell me how you do it when I myself can't. Not authentically. Not without invoking my ancestors, dragging them to shore across the ocean, onto lands where their colonisers have erected their tomb stones.
At the Rijksmuseum the daylight is ambient grey like after a snowstorm, and your eyes flit from golden frame to golden frame while I look around searching for anyone, anyone, anyone who looks like me.
