[396 words]
To find your grandmother’s house,
walk the highway until you see the billboard ad of the same two
politicians, year-marked with bad graffiti and dust and still promising
a brand new Montenegro. Cross toward the sign and pass the car wash
which seems abandoned but is heaping with huge metallic clients
waiting to be cleaned. Find the rising arm barrier – a word you had
to search for – and sneak around it into the woods. Go up. Go up for
fifteen long minutes, up the overgrown hill and down a path that’s
hardly been walked in years. Notice what’s around you: abandoned
sanatorium buildings gaping hollowly out, the stone benches, green
from moss like a child whose mother once dabbed his chicken pox
blisters with dots of green paint, but the paint was not body-safe
and now he’s marked. For days he’s marked. (Your mother told you
not to use this simile; Americans won’t get it, she said. You did anyway)
You’ll hear things while you climb. A clump of grass will shiver despite
the heat; a stone that’s stood in the same place for decades will
crumble suddenly down; a branch will crack from its tree. Don’t worry.
The snakes here won’t hurt you, and anyway, the only way forward
is through – up for the minutes it takes to reach the road, pockmarked
with steaming-hot cars and stray, sweating cats. Walk ‘till the second
arm barrier and duck. You’ll notice that the flowers on the terrace are
blooming: a selfish, irreverent beauty, which works only to emphasize
the flat staleness elsewhere. Your father once told you that this country
is ‘spiritually impoverished,’ which is why the billboards stay the same
year after year. Like the wardrobe of a dying person, this place is flea-stricken
and threatens to turn to dust, like a burnt sheet of paper, like a leaf in
another country, where June is an Autumn month, all yellow and dried out.
Like the octogenarian hands of your grandmother. Speak of the devil.
Look up. She is waiting on the balcony, waving at you with her bulbous
hands, body wrinkled as a dried date and coated in sweat like syrup.
Come here, she beckons, Come eat dinner here, and you do the only thing
you are able to — you, bad granddaughter you – run away from her until
back down below, you begin to climb again.
Yev Gelman is a Brooklyn-based writer, artist, and immigrant rights activist currently working with the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. Originally from Moscow, Yev received a dual B.A. from Fordham University in Theatre Directing and Creative Writing, and plans to continue building an artistic practice that centers public art and activism with an emphasis on migration justice and queer/trans liberation. When not working, writing-working, making-art-working, or hanging out with his loved ones, Yev enjoys reading, biking, and eating tomatoes from his garden. His work has previously been published in the Shore Poetry, engine(idling, and Peach Fuzz magazines.
