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After Metastasis by Ja’net Danielo
She can’t remember and maybe that is why I keep rearranging my living room, thinking about where the floor lamp should go. She can’t remember and this is what I tell myself when I am frightened into thinking that I am forgetting what a floor lamp is. Yesterday night I overheard a woman telling a boy to adopt a bunny and pretend to be one so that the bunny thinks he is also a bunny and befriends him and makes him one of their own like the wild ones do with each other in the bushes of thirteenth street. I want to know, when do bunnies stop being rabbits?
Across the street from the home my grandmother was put in, the night owl of eateries, the pine cone open until forever and ever where I eat chicken dumpling alphabet soup every weekend because my grandma doesn’t know how to make it anymore. She can’t remember and the cold noodles in the warm broth repel each other like oil and water and while I wait for my soup to settle I draw a picture of what the noodle-alphabet spells out today and think about what it’s going to spell out inside my stomach later and I wonder if this is what my grandma meant when said that you must not add your noodles in too late before our 67th introduction where she asks me my name again and we sit in each others company talking about the weather over and over again. Pine Cone is a truck stop and Rabbits are the same thing as bunnies and my alphabet soup says that my floor lamp should probably go in the corner.
She can’t remember and maybe that is why I keep rearranging my living room, thinking about where the floor lamp should go. She can’t remember and this is what I tell myself when I am frightened into thinking that I am forgetting what a floor lamp is. Yesterday night I overheard a woman telling a boy to adopt a bunny and pretend to be one so that the bunny thinks he is also a bunny and befriends him and makes him one of their own like the wild ones do with each other in the bushes of thirteenth street. I want to know, when do bunnies stop being rabbits?
Across the street from the home my grandmother was put in, the night owl of eateries, the pine cone open until forever and ever where I eat chicken dumpling alphabet soup every weekend because my grandma doesn’t know how to make it anymore. She can’t remember and the cold noodles in the warm broth repel each other like oil and water and while I wait for my soup to settle I draw a picture of what the noodle-alphabet spells out today and think about what it’s going to spell out inside my stomach later and I wonder if this is what my grandma meant when said that you must not add your noodles in too late before our 67th introduction where she asks me my name again and we sit in each others company talking about the weather over and over again. Pine Cone is a truck stop and Rabbits are the same thing as bunnies and my alphabet soup says that my floor lamp should probably go in the corner.
Sep 17, 2024
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I hang your jackets in my closet like trophies, or maybe like warnings. I don’t know which. I don’t wear them. It’s far too hot — sticky, oppressive heat that clings to the skin like regret — but I keep them there, row by row, like memory has a dress code. The scent is gone now. That clean, clove-sweet sharpness you always carried. Still, I walk past them every day. I make myself look.
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
It’s supposed to mean something. All of this. I keep telling myself I’m meant for something bigger — to make a name for myself, they always say — but what name? The one I was given, or the one I’ll have to carve out with blood and trembling hands? Fifty-five years. Fifty-five steps to the top of the hill, up to that damn library where I’ve been meaning to go. Where I keep meaning to go.
And yet. I don’t move.
My legs work. I know they do. They carried me through worse things — war zones of the heart, ancestral curses, kitchens full of shattered plates. But I still can’t make them climb. I don’t know if that makes me weak or merciful. I don’t know if it’s sabotage or a mercy I don’t deserve.
A dog that weeps after it kills is still a killer. A dog that weeps is still a dog.
Your guilt won’t make you holy. Your regret won’t make you clean.
So I ask: when you see a butterfly land on lavender — that momentary grace, delicate and impossible — do you still spell my name in your head, as if that might bring me back? As if I ever left?
Rec
All of the people in this Chinese restaurant are going to die some day. The deaths will not affect me, i don’t even know these people. I do not know the lady in the collared shirt who keeps looking at the ceiling or the dad talking with his teenage daughter who says “like” too much. I’ll never know the waitress who gave me my water or the young boy seating people up front. But other people know them, other people have loved them, laughed with them, seen them grow up or grow old. All of these people in this Chinese restaurant are PEOPLE, they have lives and jobs and personalities. They have dreams, and faults, and secrets they’ve kept to themselves for years now. I’ll never know all of these people, they’ll never know me. They will all die, and others in their lives will be affected wether that’s a mom, or dad or child or girlfriend. But for right now, everybody is alive, and laughing, and bonding, over this Chinese restaurant that they found on google or heard of from a friend. Life is incredibly short, we are limited in time, yet we’re not limited in love, every human has the power to love someone with all their heart, and sometimes the best way to display that love is sitting down after a long day and talking at a Chinese restaurant.
May 28, 2025
Rec
😃I know a woman
who keeps buying puzzles
chinese
puzzles
blocks
wires
pieces that finally fit
into some order.
she works it out
mathematically
she solves all her
puzzles
lives down by the sea
puts sugar out for the ants
and believes
ultimately
in a better world.
her hair is white
she seldom combs it
her teeth are snaggled
and she wears loose shapeless
coveralls over a body most
women would wish they had.
for many years she irritated me
with what I consider her
eccentricities -
like soaking eggshells in water
(to feed the plants so that
they’d get calcium).
but finally when I think of her
life
and compare it to other lives
more dazzling, original
and beautiful
I realize that she has hurt fewer
people than anybody I know
(and by hurt I simply mean hurt).
she has had some terrible times,
times when maybe I should have
helped her more
for she is the mother of my only
child
and we were once great lovers,
but she has come through
like I said
she has hurt fewer people than
anybody I know,
and if you look at it like that,
well,
she has created a better world.
she has won.
Frances, this poem is for
you.
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⭐I’m no scientist but this stuff is magical. Like those stars you can put on your ceiling.
Sep 22, 2024
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✏️The light fixture, modern,
brightens the old cracks in our ceiling.
Popcorn walls, chipped , lead paint.
Our sink spits out our upstairs neighbor’s breakfast. Sometimes eggs but usually pancake mix.
Their water drips down on us through those
same cracks while we shower.
We have beets in the fridge from
far too long ago.
The stains look like blood and we’re only 20
with a stained fridge.
I could clean up the beets and we could have new beets.
We feed their cat that visits us while we hang
our sheets to dry.
We have ugly pillows on a nice couch.
It used to be my moms.
We have a wood table with rings, drawings
and signatures from when we were 5 -
because we don’t have coasters yet.
Maybe we’ll make a home here -
but I go outside instead, because
things are better out here
and there are no cracks above me.
Sep 17, 2024
Sep 17, 2024