All the Names
LYDIA GWYN
My blood is full of someone else’s memories. The epigenetics of windows leaking in their frames, collecting moisture and holding it like breath inside. My blood knows my aunt’s broken nose along with the ex-husband who broke it once more. It keeps the memory of days like stamps removed from letters. The day my mother and I stood in my aunt’s apartment, my mother there to protect her. I watched for the ex-husband’s car, for any car entering or leaving the parking lot, while my brother slept in my mother’s arms. My brother and I were so young then, but our cells were already coursing with our mother’s swallowed hair, with the torn away patches of her baby scalp, smooth as cooled eggs. Our platelets reddened with the dinner table contests between her father and brothers to see who would be the first to make our mother cry. Years later, I sat with my uncle at a diner in New Jersey, listening to him recount those childhood meals. The cruelty of their father, how he never wanted a girl baby. My son was there in the booth with me, too young to understand words then. And my mother’s mother was there as well, sitting catatonic in my blood, staring at the bedroom wall through the California days while her kids ran all over the valley. Lightning and horned toads and too many cocktails. All the names pressed into my mother’s flesh have rounded and sweetened there over time. Will these too pass on to my children? Lighting up their organs with unanswered phone calls? My own sadness rests there in the undercurrent. The image of my brother’s body on the floor by my parents’ bed. Untold truths of unknown ancestors shaking the cells with their own leaky windows. Trespasses and shoelaces, garages full of carbon monoxide and crumpled cars quiet in the summer canyons. Give us instead the blood of quilts and peppered stitches, sapphires in our fingers. The blood of tended gardens, all the ant-chewed sugar swallowed away. My grandmother’s peonies, big as faces, white with a swirl of crimson inside.
Lydia Gwyn's stories and poems have appeared or are forthcoming in F(r)iction, Poetry Salzburg, Sublunary Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Entropy, and elsewhere. She is the author of two collections of flash fiction: You'll Never Find Another (2021, Matter Press) and Tiny Doors (2018, Another New Calligraphy). She lives in East Tennessee with her family and works as an instruction librarian at East Tennessee State University.
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THE AUTHOR ON MUSCLE MEMORY
When I saw the theme of your next issue was “muscle memory” I knew I had to submit one of the stories I’d been working on. For the past year and a half, I’ve been interested in how trauma is stored in the body. How we feel physical sensations when we relive or think about traumatic events we’ve experienced. In my own experience, for many years after my brother died, I felt a heaviness in my chest and a pain in my stomach whenever I thought about the events of his death—even twenty years later. EMDR therapy helped me to tune into the physical memory of that particular trauma in order to heal it. In “All the Names,” I’d been reading about epigenetics and wanted to explore how generational and ancestral trauma is stored in our DNA and in some way passed down to future generations. & ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE KALEIDOSCOPED To me being kaleidoscoped means to consider someone or something at close range, to look deeply upon, so closely and deeply that fractals and cells and patterns that might not be otherwise are made visible. |