Читать книгу Saudade - Traci Brimhall - Страница 15

Seven Guesses

My daughter is dead or being raised by a jamboree of jaguars

with her dress pulled over her head, pretending to be the ghost

of a blind king, or my husband will bring her body back from

where he hid it and parade her on the back of a white-eyed mule,

or she turned into a dolphin like her father and followed him

to the Orinoco where his bedtime stories feature laundry, jacaranda

blossoms, and a lovely hunchback with seven fetishes — collars, corsets,

cuffs, scratches, spankings, strap-ons, and dolls in leather shoes —

or my daughter is the tree-shaped tumor in my skull, or the echo

of a lullaby, all lonesome song and no body, or she’s a character

in the book authored by my inner voice, the one where my mother

is limping but alive, and my father escapes from prison,

and we eat guaraná grown from the left eye of the boy

whose grave opened to greet his weeping mother and a forest

rushed out, a child’s eye ripening in the mouth of every bird.