a dream in which everything my grandfather abandoned turns up in the attic
2 Minutes Read Time
Summer Assistant Editor Arah Ko: I am enchanted by the way poetry can make meaning so beautifully out of lists, and Lubar’s poem does this extremely well. With the charm of a fairytale and the ghostly quality of a haunting, this poem outlines what a grandfather abandoned, starting with the speaker of the poem themself—“and i am there, too”— and painting a picture of a life. Through spectral images like baby dolls with rolling eyes, decaying kimonos, and “coffin-sized” boxes, this poem reaches for an unnameable loss by glancing at everything around the negative space left by a lost family member to try to gather what is missing. This is a poem that becomes what its last lines describe: “a constellation // of absence held / up to the light.”
Listen to Alison Lubar read their piece:
a dream in which everything my grandfather abandoned turns up in the attic
after Tule Lake, after his death
and i am there, too.
suits, bespoke
by his wife.
a blond baby doll,
eyes rolled back.
their whites shine
like teeth. crystal
glasses with gilded rims
as a war prize.
a leather trunk
and handmade pine
box, coffin-sized,
for holding rice
air-tight.
his own mother’s
kimono, moth-eaten,
its blue and white
silk, its holey blossoms
and snaking cranes
a constellation
of absence held
up to the light.
