One of the Six Million Speaks to a Great-Grandchild about Inherited Trauma by Cynthia Gordon Kaye
Tell your mother the truth, complicated boy.
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Illuminate your cramping collegiate mind-spills, logarithms, fruit flies, Shakespeare, splattered on plush beige carpet, unreachable from your bedridden grasps.
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Beautiful boy, find the words.
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Your mother’s angry fingers flip at your closed door, your medicated synapse-firings rejecting her fresh-baked oatmeal cookies, employment ads, invitations to walk outside.
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Imaginative boy, she needs facts.
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You, our scion, our fist-shake to the past, you with unwritten phrases, unorchestrated notes, blue light on crumbs, on comic books, watch us: your ghosts in the daytime, great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, numbered cousins dead of religion so you may wallow freely, tortured so you may torture, too.
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Observant boy, we see you.
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We see thrown-off sweated-through sheets stirred by toxic memory loops, dry-erase missteps ridiculed, walled-off self-loathing pinning you down like deadweight.
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Yet you are not dead.
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Resourceful boy, make your way back.
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No joyful tears, no lightness, no faith, but know this: your mother recognizes blame, heard through old bedroom walls, yellow with metallic butterflies, door shut tight, traumatized witnesses to smokestacks rising in grasslands.
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Intelligent boy, she covers her ears.
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Tell your mother your truth, complicated boy. Bypass recriminations and censures: tell her that without her it will snow until snow reaches windows, until windows no longer open, and we are all shut in.
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Ask your mother where she has left her child.
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Beautiful boy, find your words.
Cynthia Gordon Kaye’s writing has appeared in Sonora Review, Superstition Review, and HerStry. She was shortlisted for the Craft Flash Fiction Contest and longlisted for A Public Space Writing Fellowship and The Masters Review Anthology. She earned her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she taught undergraduate creative writing courses and was the recipient of an Edward B. Kaufmann College of Liberal & Creative Arts Scholarship.