An ode to southern Germany and my cousin, Marlene.

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. 

Process

I started this poem using a free write prompt about being outside in the dark. I chose to expand on some of my favorite memories with my cousin when I visited our family in rural Germany in 2018. When I was there, for the first time, my cousin took me to this river after dinner when it got dark. I visited her again last summer and I asked her about the river. I told her I still kept the rocks we found from the summer 5 years before. I asked her to take me again. She told me about a recent act of bio terrorism where someone from the neighboring town spilled oil in the river, poisoning it. It was not safe to play in the river again. I began to expand from that image, thinking about how Germany, the landscape, and my life in America had changed in general in the 5 years since I had visited.

Through Poetry 360, I’ve been reading a bunch of Ross Gay lately. I’m inspired by how he chooses specific moments and slowly unwinds them into more abstract ideas. I wanted to do something similar in this poem. I also wanted to think of the impact of language and how language barriers contribute to misunderstanding. The words “oil spill” (Ölpfütze) and “nostalgia” (Heimwehgefühl) sound nothing alike, contrary to what I said in the poem. However I wanted to expand on this idea as well, and began to research words that sound similar in German that I can’t understand as a native English speaker. I used these similar words to sprout my metaphors. I used bis/der Biss (until/the bite), hast/hasst (has/hates), die Zähne/die Szene (teeth/scene), fällt/das Feld (falls/the field), and das Lid/ das Lied (eyelid/song). Some of these connections are obvious, while others are hidden inside the stanzas. I workshopped this piece with my mentor, scrutinizing over every detail. She helped me fine tune my language to make sure I could properly and clearly communicate the message I wanted to get across.