Vogels/Girls

By Madeline Berberian-Hutchinson

An ode to southern Germany and my cousin, Marlene.

Vogels/Girls

1. I. (2018)

Knee-deep in the shallow end of the riverbed, we sat crouched in the bordering brush.

(I did not yet know that the ticks were biting at my strappy sandaled heels, 

the venom festering inside us) and our calves began to shake from the cold rush of the river 

and the hours of waiting on relatives who did not remember our names. In the water, darkness 

clung to our thighs as our panoptical sun ran alongside her cousin 

in between the leaves – saluting a creased god.

The breeze drew her wisps of fine hair against my eyelashes. 

Our language is shaded in between heavy blinks so our eyelids began to sing. 

She taught me, in broken English, how to even our tiny palms (render them 

an unfamiliar flatness, no German or girl had ever known) so the fireflies 

would land in the softest part of our grasp – which was every part of me. 

Our mothers called us to the dinner table with the leaves and the stained tablecloth.

We grabbed our last shiny rocks by the fistful, and I folded 

my checkered Sunday dress, cut from the tablecloth, upwards

to keep the rocks safely in my grasp and wondered if this is what it’s like

to be a mother. Specks of purple nail polish floating down the stream, our bliss dripped 

onto the gravel path as we tripped on our toes up the hill. 

The grain of our grandfather’s unpolished wooden bench sliced

against the underbelly of my thighs and her face 

split in two, her teeth proudly bearing the scene where

I tattooed my name on her wrist 

with chalk, hers near my shoulder.

In an abbreviated breath she told me I had our family

until you and this sentiment had left me with a complicated guilt 

until I bit back my (grand)mother tongue: I later learned 

that she truncated her double “S” and meant to say she hated our family,

for in German the difference between having and hating are found in a single beat. 

     II. (2023)

The photos our fathers took of us had their blurry fingertips on the frame, and the river ran black, a dark, unforgiving sludge. The pool (where her little brother almost drowned) was filled with cement, and her blue-eyed horse had died, buried near the patch of Edelweiss where we screamed, for the first time, curses in English. 

Me not knowing the word for nostalgia, her not knowing the word 

for oil spill, we tried to explain what had elapsed, tried to explain 

why the hair on our legs and the lilac grass in the field were so closely shaven. 

But the word for exhalation had not yet sprouted in either of our disjointed lexicons. 

I now know diasporic and dysphoric still sound the same on my tongue: neither 

the land nor the body will ever be mine.