Pre-Cana pt. 2: His Name
By Christine Byrne
Featured art: “Lifted Fog” submitted anonymously
Purgatory calls me by old names:
Come, have a meal with me, Piano Fingers
Picks from the rotisserie chicken—sickened—Stop all these questions
About death. I’m just a middleman, baby,
Let’s get back to your story:
In my life I was a sculptor
& my father was a drummer
& our house was fractured sunlight slipping
Through blinds. My bedroom had
Three pink walls & one damaged from water
I was their only daughter
My father saved up to buy me that gold necklace
But I lost the Claddagh almost immediately
After he gave it to me, my father who
Found that drum kit on the curb working
On the garbage truck, my father who
Told me our history
Was lost in me. That I would be nothing but distance:
My single tongue. My childhood parish. Teaghlach.
I wasn’t easy to raise, I barricaded that bedroom, climbed
Out that second story, felt him chase me
Through the cul-de-sac, my barefeet throbbing—
Purgatory: Who am I to judge?
I married a manmade Lake Michigan:
Telling Cain, retching in October sunlight: I can’t take your name
The pseudonyms of wandering: Descendent of raven, the martyr’s color,
Certavi et vici
As a kid Cain found bones, deer teeth, & milked them
With a toothbrush & peroxide
I can’t wash him out of me
The Irish word for honey
The Irish word for love
Written in my grade school notebook somewhere…
My father didn’t come to the wedding, fidgeting
The distance
Where would God be in a 24-hour diner?
Maybe I do
Precipitate the downside, outstretch cadence
Hung to dry by clothespin
Fingering the booth’s paper foldings of our names
Most mornings of my life I woke to the sound of drumming—
Wood split in the kitchen flooring from winter’s pressure. Mama, Banaltra na cuaiche,
Toeing the little divide like any other absence, trying to cool it over:
You know how he gets with these Irish funerals.
Just give it time
You’ll get to know this
For yourself one day. The means of reverence…
To home:
(I was the Cuckoo’s nursemaid)
To unions:
(I have no experience to say)
I’m back in Chicago, rainbeat
Purgatory: what happened to Cain?
Denominate my name into distance
That summer I was so nervous I made him watch me strip naked
& check my body for ticks awkward, dressing in the doorframe
Trying it all on—
He was a highway backseat car window so close to shut it’s making that kind of screaming
Which is also whispering
We did make it
Across the country—just no further than that
I ran in my wedding dress straight into the Atlantic (I’d been wearing it for days)
(veil’d blown off in the car) tulle floating, dumping
What we had left of the Pacific, shallowed & hallowed & ten feet away:
Cain barefoot on the beach
They say water keeps:
Wading in my wedding gown, bucking, bobbing
Beside my chin, treading for a second
Grins blinking out the sun, his feet sinking into dry land, just the two of us
Silent there, looking at each other.
Christine Byrne is a writer and artist from New England. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in Pacifica, Driftwood Press, Thin Air, and others.