In Love Canal, New York,
where I could reach across the river and graze the tips of your fingers,
where our existence was simplistically finite and satisfying,
we stayed for 40 years,
residing in the town time forgot to check on.
We would read the same book over and over again,
passing it back and forth over the worn-wood kitchen table,
ink flowing from ballpoint pens as we marked specific passages over and over,
the meaning contrived with our writing.
Out of nowhere,

I like men like trees.

What does she mean by that?

What do you mean?

You know, tall, stur//dy

Older than you?

It slipped out.

No… yeah, I guess.

She had a thing for older men.
Mr. Davinson was not the most present father.
He would drift in and out of her and her brother’s lives,
stopping every few years to create a memory,
then gone again,
leaving them with little phrases they would come to imbue.
Snippets like
literacy is the path to communism,
you can’t create what you do not know,
and
owls never blink twice.
Because Mr. Davinson would up and go without a sound,
she and her brother grasped tightly onto whatever they could from him.
They internalized a genius father,
and, in turn,
resented their mother for ever letting him go.

I like men like trees.
A subconscious need for someone to need her
sunk deep in her brain, perfect for the next older-than-her man to come along
and snatch up whatever was left from the previous lover.

What is your favorite type of tree?

What do you mean?

I froze.

Psychoanalyzing never got me anywhere.
Opposite to hers,
my father was highly present.
He was a therapist for a living.
He purported to extend mental perception,
expand what was known into the unknown.
At the end of the day,
he would rifle through the cashier for 1984 coins,
pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters.
His favorite book became mine,
and throughout the fourth grade,
he would read it to me every night,
divining the tales of Winston and his Big Brother.
In reality,
at the age of eight,
his mother had bought him the children’s edition,
and my father never realized the thirty-eight-year-old copy was not the actual book.
He would flip through the pages while I scrambled into bed,
looking for my favorite part of the novel.
Here it is, The Story of The Thoughtcrime.
When we last left Winston,
he had bought a diary from a vintage shop in Oceania,
to write his thoughts in
because his Big Brother had magical powers
to read through his thoughts.
He was only safe if they were written down and hidden away.
I fell asleep to these words every night,
dreaming of my own little diary with my own protected thoughts.
My father thought
that by reading 1984 (the junior copy) to me every night,
I would become a therapist like him,
able to unlock others’ thoughts with one question.

Did he see himself as Big Brother?

I am frozen still.
My father would be disappointed.
I grabbed the pen beside
me
and made a crude little tree in the space to the right of Dante’s writing.
It looked like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree,
pathetic.
I slid the book back to her in a desperate attempt to apologize.
She flipped the book around, chuckled,
then looked at me.
She picked up her pen and sketched out Charlie,
button nose, circle head, striped shirt, and all.
He’s reaching out to hug his Christmas tree,
to show this skinny little plant that he
cares.
Keeping her hands on The Inferno,
she slid it over to me and looked up.

In Love Canal, New York,
we became one.