For weeks after we moved
into the new apartment
I pestered you
to fix the sign over my bed,
done in frilly pink and purple script
to look like the page of a fairy tale.
“Kimmy’s Special Place,” it said,
and, if you remember,
I was not Kimmy,
the previous tenant.
A fact I wanted known,
but not the way you did it:
scrawling my name over hers
in teal print
so loudly wrong it trumpeted,
not yours, not home, no happy ending.
I’m sympathetic, really.
You used the paint you had
on hand. You weren’t my father.
You didn’t owe me. Years later,
I can be grateful
for the small things,
like how you only hit my mother
when you thought I was sleeping.
But the way you blanked out Kimmy
was plain lazy. You could draw—
cartoons, animals, faces.
How many times
had I watched you?
Kimmy haunted me. I dreamed
I had stolen her life, her room,
the white colonial furniture
with the squeaky pulls
she left behind when she went
to the suburbs.
No, Kimmy is not an alias
to protect the innocent.
Her real name is lost. I subbed in
something close
to what you called me.
I want to write your name explicitly,
your age, your birthday,
where you went to high school,
the little I retain. Not a threat—
only the urge to decorate
a dim-lit wall.
For now, you’re penciled there
under the names
of your daughters,
who call me older sister
in their sad stories, started where
you left off, abandoned
before they knew their colors
or how to read.
