Otherland

Abstract

Otherland Mee Ok Icaro (bio) they find her shivering stained t-shirt over wild bare legs in an alley my mother's body in the shapeof unknown food chewed by a scatter of teeth I never saw her mud-matted fishing-wire hair but my brother offers to send me the picture he took of her when he showed up like a heart attack that day thatgathered into years when she was lost a child with the senior's special schrödinger's mom dead (not dead) her missing body chiseled to ice under a bridge every timeit snowed No I hear myself say leave me my memories of her before she ate dumpsters without underwear spare me the mouth that once spun my lullabieswhen she was all bare-footed earth-skulled lunulae I have so little little girl in me left [End Page 33] my mother knew my name the one she gave me talked to me same as her father gone ten years nowseen him last week in her ceiling I need to tell grandpa the birds oh I forget their names are waiting for their packages of weatherand string and blue china dishes the ones we use on easter he knows the one I am with you now, mother, feeding you five cheese ziti from olive garden while a woman frothing at the head rocks and screams your brokenstare two eyes two punched out windows one for each vanished son you hallucinate the only way to get them to visit you ice in my sockets melting down my cheeks I leave you in a confusion happier than truth punch the code steel doors open leads to the firstthread of hallways past motionless wheelchairs bouquets of pissneurotic light bulbs flickering dark in this cement palace where you will die in the corner next to a phone that never rings a folder squeezing a single slip of paper with my namedate and time in small handwriting that proves that yes, mommy I saw you [End Page 34] a woman in muted scrubs asks me if I am your daughter tells me you are her favorite that you write me lettersbackwards in the swatch of window near your bed because you say I live in the tree outside your forever room you write to me like a child on a fogged car window messages to a passing stranger speeding down an unpaintedhighway because grandpa visits you in the sky but I, I live in your tree [End Page 35] Mee Ok Icaro Mee Ok Icaro is an award-winning literary prose stylist and occasional poet. She is the winner of the inaugural Prufer Poetry Prize, runner-up in the Prairie Schooner Creative Nonfiction Contest, and a finalist for the Scott Merrill Award for poetry as well as the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, River Teeth, Bennington Review, Witness, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, American Journal of Poetry, Michael Pollan's "Trips Worth Telling" anthology, and elsewhere. She is also featured in [Un]Well on Netflix and is working on a forthcoming memoir. Mee-ok.com Copyright © 2022 Pleiades and Pleiades Press