The Birth of Alva
2 Minutes Read Time
Alva sits under the tree. The leaves make a second sky
if you look up
at the right angle, and pretend
you have forgotten
how you came to be there.
Alva is and is not me. Sometimes
I’m tired of walking around in the same
ole body, under the same
foam-ceilinged sky
or the too-blue August one
with its nagging sun, or the one on the page with all its bright
re-memories,
radiant as neck pain and the damaged joint
that burns
with Sirius-level
white-heat-that-feels-like-red-heat
when I turn to look
behind me. I wanted Alva to be born in 1914.
So far back in history
it had nothing to do with me.
I wanted her to go to war and survive
in a way that I had read might be
possible. I wanted to make her a preacher’s
daughter, a midwife, a physicist smashing particles
into God
in the Large Hadron Collider. I wanted her
to avoid all the black holes while falling
into them. I wanted for her
all the metaphors of all the things: the sparrow
and cactus and burned-out
star and magnolia and
broken bread and lover’s sweat
burning the shape of waves on the fitted sheet
I will wash in a week when he leaves for good and crumple
into a ball in the back of the closet
because I’ve never learned to fold
it. I’ve failed to be anything else. Thirty-seven. Then thirty-eight.
Alva could only add up to anything
but me,
poor gal, though she’s been a good sport—
a phrase only men use, that really means
you only know
how to lose. So here’s the truth. Alva is and isn’t
me. She was born
in 1979. Her father put her
in her mother
after the Iranian Revolution and the hostages,
after Jimmy Carter
sold his peanut farm. But before
the internet and the phone
Alva uses as both a compact and companion:
checking her red lipstick,
right before she tries again,
seeing how she’s drawn between the lines
without looking. To see how close she is
to breaking through.
Read more from Issue 16.1.
