Oriana IvyWhen God says, I could give you
the whole world, but would you take it? he’s expecting No, since I am the alleged immigrant at the feast, but I say Yes. Go ahead, give me the world. But that happened already at my birth. Now I believe only in California, dressed in flames each scarlet, smoky year. A paradise built on fault lines. Like my life, split at seventeen. Or my soul, a burglar breaking through the clouds. Not even the body remains our native country. Leaving me only the inaccurate loss of homeland, a place where you go to die. By nineteen I had a plan: word by word I would dissolve into the thousand-year-old town where I was born, an old Viking river port, the river wide as history -- In the fortress-like cathedral, walls four feet thick, underworld-cold, above the crown of thorns, me that shivering dove; me the bowing of the wind in the tales of linden trees; in the empty granaries, blinding dance of dust and light. Meanwhile I’ll take the world. |