DRIFT

It’s been years. Still, when you wake

your sister is dead. All day she dogs you:

Not here, not here. Not like you’re losing it,

like you’ve skipped breakfast. Or no. Not hungry

but homesick. A condition you expect

will soon be recognized as a disease.

She wasn’t depressed; she was homesick.

You long for your sister until her absence

becomes familiar, always wakes early,

never learns to let itself out.

But hope is a symptom

of the homesick, rises as you settle—

but if. Tell your sister, little sister, she can’t pester

if she does not exist. Then she’ll raise

you a river: Remember how you let go

of this? And you will wish to remember

your river, where you pissed and fished and kissed

a swimmer with driftwood arms that held

you in your astonishment: it won’t be this good

again. You’ve floated in the radiance

of your own blood, held your breath

for the perch to find you. You’ve almost been

the baby drowned, but your father—your fat,

lazy father!—ran in to save you, not

stopping even to kick off his sneakers.

Dropped your ice cream, and watched it stream away.

When you pressed your face closer, the river

let you in. You’ve jumped from rocks, felt your feet

hit the bottom and thought, Lucky.

There, says the empty space of your sister,

not hungry but lucky. Like swimming, homesickness

is a passage of giving in.

Your river accommodated you. You had

it filled. Your sister won’t unstick

her skin from your shoulder, even as her lines

drift into shade. Wake up and remember:

You had a river. You had a sister.

ECHOLOCATION

I can tell you’ve been home by the olives—

three green, two black, one half-sucked stone

—I think you like olives a lot

less than you think you like olives. You buy

them but then you don’t eat them:

Is it fair to say you just like to look?

I skirt the women on Sixteenth Street like

I’m looking but really it’s more like I’m

sounding—the mood between her and me, our

proximity. I am a bat.

I am an unclaimed balloon, pleased to mosey with

-out any greater sense of self

than brushing one of us on my way to Union

Square at dusk, the farmers’ market not yet shut

and I have cash enough for fennel, bread,

eggs. Six bucks a dozen. The Egg-Man

could tug a bat from the air bare-handed.

“Between you and me,” the Egg-Man sighs,

“the sight of a beautiful woman does give me

pleasure in my day.” To prove my eggs

are all intact, he tips the carton wrong-

side up. Then he says, “When Uma Thurman

comes to my tent, she has to duck.”

I say, Gosh—

she must be tall. The Egg-Man snaps his pink

elastic round my dozen: “That’s a funny

accent. Why did you come here?” he wonders.

“It’s not as though you’re from a third-world country.”

I am a bat. I think, how he butters

me up. But I tell the Egg-Man, who still

has my eggs, I’m here for love. He says a lot

of us say that, last week he met a girl

with a boyfriend in Australia. “She

visits every month for some refreshment.”

Then Uma comes over to buy her eggs

and the Egg-Man surrenders, lifting

 a brown size six for her to sniff.

I try not to look like I’m looking.

My own balloon, my actress,

I’ll leave the eggs out here, where you will notice—

though you don’t see the thick soot on the ceiling-

fan or the black mould in the grouting

while I whisker against olive stones, black bat

returned, would know the grit and grain of this

home blind, scout out even the tub for you

when perturbed you point to the bathwater

the colour of olives, fear the plumbing

if not the pink ring we’ve grown at the high

soaking mark, I’ll get in to show you

the water isn’t poisoned, just dirty.

Evangeline Riddiford Graham is the author of the poetry chapbooks La Belle Dame Avec Les Mains Vertes (Compound Press, 2019) and Ginesthoi (hard press, 2017). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Poets & Writers, The Spinoff, Westerly, and The Art Paper. Originally from Whakatū, she lives in New York City.