Model Home

by Rivers Solomon

We are forest creatures who’ve wandered into the man-made road, eyes frozen and wide.

Every day, everyone is a hundred different people: who they are when they are alone and feeling fuckable, who they are when they are alone and feeling unfuckable, who they are when they are grief wrecked, when they are joy smacked.

How cruel that our parents, unexorcisable, go on inside of us. How cruel that we cannot disimbricate their ghosts from our being.

I want me to be innocent, too. I want it more than anything. But I am not even an I or a me.

Can the cellar that a kidnapper throws a child into be guilty or innocent? The lake that a killer drowns his women in? I’m not a person but a place where bad things happen.

Don’t think me small. If I am ever fragile, it is only because I prefer to be. Children, girls. Daughters, says Mama. Don’t you know that we have survived everything? Did you know that you have been alive for millions of years? That the whole history of the earth is inside of you? We are ocean people. We are field people. We fought and we are here.

And what of my father? Where is my ire for him? Okay, but like, what of anyone’s father. Goodness, we can’t be disappointed by men we never once believed in.

The house does not like to be gazed upon, like a 1950s white southern woman.

History repeats and repeats because history is people, and we can reproduce only what we know, and we get what we know from our elders. The same mechanisms that facilitate language facilitate the passing on of pain.

I can’t tell the difference between grief and ghosts. Both seize the body and take what they will.

How powerful it would be for us to be called animals and say, Yes, yes, of course. And what does that make you? Not animal? Not flesh? Not alive? Dead.