Unravelling Eden

By Aliyah Blattner

i.

When the garden begins to die / we fail to discern green from red / We continue to water the fields / not knowing our plots are barren / the flowers a string of rotting corpses poking out from loose soil / Long ago, the angels broke into our nurseries / and replaced our eyes with mirrors / Now, when we look into the wasteland / we see Eden alone

But the massacre makes herself known when the rockets turn the Earth to soot / We gag on the smog as it fills our lungs / and press the heels of our palms into our eyes / The pillars of ash inspire tears / and it is our weeping that washes the glass away / We look in horror upon the flower boxes / only to discover graveyards in their place

The first howl calls the angels to us / They command we look into the sun until we lose ourselves to the visions / to the green / But the angels set themselves on fire when we choose to riot against the sky instead

Because Eden is burning / and the flower petals lie flat against their stems / the leaves wilted and scorched / We watch as organisms die / as seedlings fail to sprout roots / as the flower beds drown beneath the onslaught of monsoons / The angels strive to undo our awakening by chanting prayers in ancient tongues / But they resolve to throw our bodies into the sea when the inferno sets the sky ablaze too

/ They know there is no returning to the cave we left behind /

The Enemy arrives in the form of a blue jay / She scans our fields in search of a stray apple seed with which to erect a new garden / Because the Enemy is an opportunist / She knows to strike when the red spills over

So the angels perform the mourner’s kaddish / and their serpentine hisses mark the descent of the apple from its tree / The elders call our questions self-destructive / They banish us from the garden / Banish us from Eden / And we wonder to ourselves what will be left of this paradise / if we ever choose to return

ii.

Imagine: A pregnant sky is ripping itself apart / and a rampage of color floods the chasm / The angels dart through the falling debris / their laughter echoing within the abyss / The garden has conquered our sun / Its vines smothered the light until only green remained / The world is a rotting fruit / Its flesh is browning / Peel back each layer of sky / Dig your fingers deep into heavenly matter to unearth soil and sediment / Condemn the warmth when it ebbs away

/ Because this storm is green / And I miss green / Imagine missing green /

The cyclones swept our light away / and victimized us to the spinning / The village people gathered together / and collected the scraps of sky as they tumbled down to Earth / When tendrils snagged on branches / or launched themselves off the lips of roofs / the village children would kneel in the town square / and repent for their parents’ howling / The sky is an unravelling tapestry / and we spend centuries constructing ladders tall enough to reach / But the angels push us off as we near the top / They teach us that some desires must be left behind

/ Imagine leaving yourself behind / Imagine spinning in the heart of green / the storm a cyclone / the angels midwives to the sky /

The garden sets itself on fire as night falls / Our moon wars with the apple tree that slaughtered the sky / The angels arm themselves / They know this unwinding is permanent / We invoke a revolution when the Enemy steals our stars / and hides them away inside a pomegranate’s belly / But the angels perform c-sections on the pomegranates / They deliver to us a new sun / A red sun / A sun born to hate the green / Imagine hating green / Imagine an ocean bathed in red light / A wound so foul / you choose to say goodbye to color entirely

/ Imagine closing your eyes until the red disappears / Imagine a garden held hostage by night /

iii.

“But is this the way?” / we ask ourselves / the elders lost to the visions / and gorging themselves on milk and honey / When the light burned new names into our skin during the summer of our awakening / we held hands and danced in circles beneath the stars / We found our power in the howling / our feral moans / promises in a tongue / we were never to truly understand

What does it now mean to remember? / To function as a vessel of our shared history? / What is to be done when the weight of our persecutions pulls the muscle from our bones / the skin of our bellies distending into an unrecognizable body? / What do we / putty people / protect in this distortion? / Or are we merely a vase to be shattered / a delicate urn spilling over / flooding the village with the ashes of a lost world

I no longer know how to carry these stones / and I have grown tired of harboring our ancestor’s grief / When I was young / my mother taught me to hide the things I refused to understand / in empty shoe boxes beneath my bed / I pull out these cardboard caskets now / and find dead cicadas piled inside

We have turned our backs on divinity / in the hopes of preserving a way of life the Enemy erased centuries ago / We have donned their clothing / and learned their language / sat at the heads of their tables / and spilt wine on their carpet / This so called “resilience” is a stain on our people / The neshamot of our infants blaze crimson in warning

I fear that I have learned our customs / the way one learns to hold a woman by her hair to drown her / I can no longer deny that I know these things / any more than I can deny how I am both the reluctant angel and the woman held under / This submergence is HaShem’s work / performed both by the hands of the stranger / and by the hands of our own people

As I hack up the currents trapped inside my lungs / hold back my hair so sea can reunite with sand / My body is a vessel of transformation / of metamorphosis / a conduit of unmaking / And this purging is a new right of return

Let me wipe my mouth on the sleeve of the Enemy’s robe / that your father dressed you in the night you claimed your manhood / and execute this ritual cleansing / one of water / and not of fire / not of burning / alongside me / Help me forge a better peoplehood / because the cicadas are emerging from their tombs / and I want us to go out / and greet them together