Nests
After Ravi Mangla’s “Anamnesis”
This was before the empty wasp’s nest crumbled and fell to the porch, splintering like rotted wood, and the neighbor’s dog drowned in the community pool; this was before I crushed ramen packets and ate the powder from the bag, bone-colored dust crusting beneath my fingernails; this was before I emptied my father’s ashes onto the road behind the strip mall, and before the number of annual “happy birthday!” voicemails from relatives dwindled from seven to one; this was before I sat on the toilet and plucked the hairs from my scalp strand by strand with a pair of your faded pink tweezers; this was before my father’s station wagon crashed into a pine tree off of Bethania Lane, and the windshield shattered into fractal-like shards and punctured his internal carotid artery; this was before the wasps started weaving their nest under the eaves of the house, and I believed the bartender when he said I love you and kissed the soft spaces under my chin; this was before my father slashed the backyard screen door with a Swiss Army knife and screamed let me in, motherfucker, spitting Budweiser onto the WELCOME doormat; this was before I burned a pot of paper ingots and washed your headstone with bleach; this was before the hummingbirds vanished from the backyard fig tree, and the baby across the street overheated in a car; this was before I took hour-long showers, skin shriveling like the dried plums you used to eat every afternoon; this was before I dragged my father out on the porch, laying him under an orange bulb that pulsed with the wingbeats of mosquitos; this was before I dropped out of state college, and my boyfriend of two years left me for a paper-pale Russian girl he found on Craigslist; this was before the last family of hummingbirds left behind a nest of spider silk and membranous eggshells, and the homeless man downtown told me I was beautiful and sold me a bouquet of baby’s breath; this was before my boyfriend and I branded the insides of our wrists with matching snake tattoos, and before my father fell unconscious on the couch, smelling of vodka and pineapple juice; this was before I found you with a paisley scarf wrapped around your neck, hanging from the ceiling rafter, head straining like a rose blossom; this was before the boy from my physics class fingered me behind the McDonald’s playground, and before you bent to take a rack of ribs out of the oven, the welts on your arms shining indigo; this was before you dripped sugar water into the beaks of the hummingbirds, and I locked myself in the hallway closet, the sleeve of my father’s coat stuffed in my mouth; this was before you sat on the couch, painting my toenails electric orange and humming to “The Girl from Ipanema”; this was before the boys tied jump ropes around my ankles like plastic red handcuffs; this was before you clogged the sink with plastic-coated pills; this was before the hummingbird eggs split open; this was before my father called you a crazy bitch; this was before I blew out the sparkler candles; this was before all of that, on a mild, violet-hazed Sunday morning, when you placed one hand on my shoulder and slid open the screen door and pointed to one of the wispy finger-like branches of the fig tree outside, and said, Look up there. You see that? It’s a hummingbird nest. Isn’t it beautiful?