Dear Editors

of Memoir (and):

Thank you for your prudent (and minor) suggestions for my poem, "Can These Bones Live." I apologize for sitting on your email for 54 days.

Though I responded only this morning, that's not to say that I haven't xeroxed and shredded copy after copy of both the poem and your suggestions, and eaten bowlfuls of those syllables every morning for weeks.

What you don't know is this:

Last September, fifteen days before you asked for my two poems — both of which veer into explicit details about two of my most fissured interactions with my father — my father Googled me. And unearthed my pseudonym.

A year prior to his sleuthing, when I first created the pseudonym, it occurred to me that in order to obliterate any possibility of him finding me, I should reinvent my entire biography and omit details such as the name of my graduate school or my ethnicity. But my conscience (integrity? fear? pride? idiocy?) wouldn't allow it.

I could barely even change my name.

I took my father's mother's maiden name, gave it an American, first-name spelling, then adopted that as the pseudo-half of my -nym.

How Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto had the balls to shear off his identity and become Pablo Neruda (to avoid his father, funnily enough), I don't understand.

I wrote "Can These Bones Live" without meaning to. It was what they call a "gift poem." One that heaved out of me in a lump sum as though I were birthing a grown, balding man and not an infant.

I wept through its creation, and perhaps I haven't touched much of it or ever really shown it to anybody because it's difficult to relive those moments, however subtly they were hinted at in that muted representation of two of the most bloodsucking months of my life.

Gah!

I don't know why I'm talking like that. All long sentences and "subtly"s.

This poem is a prayer. This poem sinks its teeth into a passage in Ezekiel. I don't love this poem. I hold my breath every time I read it. I don't don't don't want can't please don't want my father to find this one.

It's not that the story is difficult to tell.

It's just difficult to know that no meticulously sculpted phrase could ever perfectly capture those months. It's difficult to know that no one can ever really get it.

"... I sat in one chair / for days at a time. His right eye twitched. He crouched / in the bathroom for hours sometimes."