1. Litany [Eulogy] to the Things That I Am Shedding 

To perform alchemy, no permission is needed from the materials being converted into something precious. There is understandably little resistance to the prospect of being turned to gold. I am writing a letter to you, the conjurer. I am writing a letter to me, too. 

I’ve tried to close my eyes and see the center of you, heavy-weighted and sunken by something formless. The truth is that I do not know you; the truth is that I do not know you enough to hate you or forgive you, to apologize for what I imagine has happened to you that left your insides mangled. 

It’s rumored that the Chinese inception of gunpowder began with an attempt to formulate a draught for eternal life. An agent of contemporary death sluicing forth from efforts toward immortality. 

When I say alchemy, do I mean triage? 

To the conjurer: You brought forth so much ugliness, carefully arranged it around me in a circle, omens of what would poison me in the years to come. I used to say that it was one of my gifts to transfigure something ugly into something precious. Now I hope instead that I simply have the good sense to throw away what is waste so that I am only left with the valuables. 

My memory has become a tesseract that consumes and reveals itself in tandem. By this I mean, I find it difficult to recall … by this I mean, I am locked in a spinning, concentrated remembrance. 

I do not personify you. In your memory, I am the only thing that gets personified. You are somewhere between fiction and hatred. You are somewhere between what I did and what I didn’t do. You are real to someone, somewhere. Have I personified you?

You are real to your mother. Sometimes when I think of your mother, I am consumed with a hatred so visceral it makes me vibrate. How could she fail you so grossly? 

Ideas of successful alchemy in India have included the creation of a divine body. A body untouched by death or decay, a body unslandered. (I imagine that you pray that I will die. I pray the same for you.) A divine body cannot be prayed against because it is insurmountably alive. (Or, I hope you pray that I will die.) 

I personally find the idea of divinity unsettling. My most childlike solaces come from the promise of your eventual death, and from the certainty of my own. A promise that eventually I will not have to bear your existence in a shared world. (The worst? That you do not remember me. That you do not pray for anything at all.) 

2. The Cast; Or, How My Mother and Your Mother are Bound, Though They Have Never Met 

My mother: 

My father: 

Me: 

She: [see above] 

Your mother: 

Conjurer: [see above] 

You: [see above] 

// ibid. “When memory shifts to fantasy” 

To be clear: you are not real. The Conjurer is not real. Your mother is not real. Only me, only my mother, only my father, only me and me and me 

My friend asked me once, “How long do you think this will be a part of your life?” A snarled part of me knew that he meant, how much longer could this go on? We were throwing rocks at a brown bottle bobbing upside down in the ocean. This part of the ocean was toxic, and we weren’t supposed to swim. I wanted so badly to be the one to hit the bottle. I threw rock after rock, but I never hit it.

You pooled in the mold where desire mixed with the hovering of a hand over the flame. I can imagine you, expansive, arched over me. Behind you, stars. I have immortalized a part of myself in this moment, and she wholly inhabits it. She stands up from where she was pinned; she walks circles around you, she eyes your exposed skin and kicks pebbles aimlessly. She checks her text messages. She is not sorry for what is happening. She is bored. She is observing a statistically common crime. To this day I am turned on by my own vulnerability, a tangle in my sexuality that never fully irons itself flat. 

3. 

Here is an email that I received from your mother: 

As we are working through this, we are requesting, respectfully, that you hold of on sending us further emails. 

Everything you have sent our way or directed at us is being thoroughly looked into. Do you have a case number we could refer to? 

We take these allegations very seriously and again we are looking into them. 

Sincerely, 

Respectfully, 

How dare you,

Please, 

4. 

Who is my mother? 

Caucasian Female 

Birthdate: 11/02/72 

I will list what I know. 

Blonde, muscular, tanned. 

Straight nose, large eyes, scarred legs. She has been an outdoor guide, a pharmacy technician, a makeup saleswoman, a wetlands delineation assistant, a Bible-study leader, a park ranger. She is kind, energetic, driven, awkward, clever, likeable. She is blunt, moody, impassioned. 

I am halted by a catch of the throat when I think of everything she has been, and how I still do not fully see her as she is. I cannot unsee her at 23, freshly out of college and newly married, and at 28, nearly widowed, and at 45, staring down the barrel of me. 

There is still a great deal of her life that is obscured from me. She tells stories of her early twenties with a dark fondness. The message is: “I wouldn’t do that again.” The friends in her stories play out horrible fates, their choices looming over them as warning beacons. Her friend was an alcoholic; her friend got an abortion and cried for days. These stories fill up a void around a faint outline of my mother, the observer. I imagine her standing in the wings, discreetly taking notes. I wonder about these friends, archetypes acting out her greatest, hard-learned lessons. Its hard to imagine girl-who-cried-for-days-post-abortion as a real human person. I watch my mother carefully for any sign of unbidden secret-sharing.

5. 

The truth is that I can never tell a story full enough to hold her. For every moment of pain and sorrow dealt by her hand, there are a thousand moments of joy and tenderness, of care that I have not been able to comprehend. The sacrifice of a career for children, the scaffolding she became to hold up my father’s broken body and the lives of my brother and I at two and four years old, respectively. I do not yet know how to write about my mother because I do not understand how her lifetime is housed within her skeleton. 

6. 

The women in my family are digestive systems. They churn and metabolize sorrow, package it and slip it into their pockets . Matriarchs, strewn about with a loose hand. 

(ibid, my mother and my grandmother) 

Two lines running parallel for a lifetime, occupying the same kitchen, the same sedan, the same family, eyeing each other with everything: resentment, sadness, ache, disappointment, wild longing. My grandmother cried on the phone telling me that my mother cancelled a trip to visit her because of the pandemic. This tenderness, obscured from the source. Eyes trained steadily on each other, a thumb boring into the soft flesh of a plum, strands running meaty under the nail. Toughen up, don’t give, but want and want. 

7. 

I am real to my mother. I may be her from 20 years ago and she cannot see me without seeing herself. Children are either mirrors or failed mirrors. 

My mother’s father Art died when she was 26, very suddenly. He was crushed by an ice delivery truck. My grandmother has become curdled and bitter since then, and how could you blame her? (My mother could blame her.) 

My grandmother owns the ice delivery service, the site of my grandfather’s death. She has cultivated a livelihood surrounding the prospect of keeping things fresh.

2016: I experienced a series of sexual abuses. Like an animal frantic to escape from a trap, my mother pitched and head-shook to deny this information. She found my experiences entirely intolerable. “If that’s sexual assault,” she coughed at me once, “Then I’ve been sexually assaulted.” 

I watched her in this moment from several inversions away (body inside, body outside, body inside, body outside) 

How do I want my mother to feel when she reads this? What do I hope she sees? What do I wish was hidden from her? 

It does not escape me that most of my stories about my mother start with “I” 8. 

My father has not died yet but I think I have a memory of his death. Footfalls on the tiled mouth of the threshold, sun fractured through the triangle panes of glass.He leaves out the front door, the screen door that I slammed my thumb in years later (I still have a scar running up the center of my right thumbnail), the same screen door I would snatch open after receiving a slivered paper cut from a plastic balloon string: decorations celebrating my father’s return. 

What do I want to give my father? A list: 

(a) Hospital hallways, teetering wildly on themselves, cranberry juice in thin paper cups, nurse sneakers, shins and knees of doctors, eye level with the squawking machinery threading my father’s body 

(b) Vanilla cake with blue buttercream frosting waiting on the washing machine, streamers in the kitchen, family and friends lining our driveway 

(c) A little girl sitting in the front yard, the red flare of dusk yawning over her. She is drawing a picture, a gaping black hole that is swallowing up her father’s body.

What do I want to return to my father? 

(a) A letter that he wrote to me to be read after he died, which I found accidentally, and which began by saying, when you read this, I won’t be… and which I dropped like it was burning 

(b) A figure leaning in the bathroom doorway, prosthetic limb propped against the door jamb. “You will have to move on somehow,” which to me meant swallow, and to him meant survive 

9. 

A Thank You Letter 

To the conjurer: because of you I can see my mother and father in 4-dimensions. I see them now and I also see every person before them nested within them, climbing their throats to escape. My mother is her mother and her brother and her father and every man she has ever kissed and my father is every car he has ever driven in and every alley he has staggered in and every moment of quiet between half-waking and sleep. 

To the conjurer: I invoke you the same way one slams their hand in a screen door (again and again and again and again) 

I love a boy who loves a man who has died. We were watching TV, a hospital soap, and a character who houses a disease-ridden liver vomits black blood onto the floor of a hospital. “My dad had that,” the boy says. I can’t tell if he means the blood or the vomit or the disease. “That’s how they found him in his house alone.” 

I would tell this story to the conjurer, if I could. “Look at that,” I would spit, pointing at the boy who loved a man who died. “You have a perfectly good dad and still turned out all poisoned.” Look at that, proof that you are all useless with no good reason, proof that ruin is not hereditary, that the apple falls and falls and falls, that you are all ruined and ruined and ruined. 

To the conjurer: My mother says I am a combattant. What do I want her to call me instead?

10. 

My father doesn’t drink, but I do. He’s been taking pills every day for 17 years, which patch the weakened parts of his body and dissolve small perforations in his intestines 

Lie down on the pavement, Dad, I’ll draw a chalked outline around you 

Space ballooned around your body to house the times you have laid face-up on the couch, radiating with pain, and space to hold a twenty-year old self kneeling next to a greyhound in a photo outside his parent’s house 

Space expanded to hold an unbroken body. Is it the right or left leg that is missing? 

Now you draw a chalked outline around me 

Body intact 

Point to where it hurts, and I just lie there 

Unblinking 

If I could return the letter to you, I would finish it by asking if you can see yourself from before, by asking if what you believed to be your final moments held a flash of memory: whole body, whole heart, whole stomach, whole daughter beside you 

What do I want from my father? 

For him to have never been hurt? 

For him to have understood me when I was hurt? 

To want this demands a kind of impossible imagination. Who would I have become if my father and I had not been ourselves for our entire lives?

11. 

To the conjurer: here are vignettes that I remember you by. 

Your head bent low, forehead nearly touching that of my oldest friend. You are both laughing. There is a sunken well in my stomach. 

Your hand pressed over my throat, eyes glassy. 

Where you are in my memory is gutted clean, scraped raw and empty. I am convinced that you are less of a thing than an absence of one. 

To tell the truth: I have feared you deeply, though never as deeply as I feared my mother, and never as deeply as I have feared myself. You were afraid of me, too. I mistook it for rage and bent like a willow under you. 

To tell the truth: I wanted you to love me more than I have ever wanted anything. I wanted a world from you. 

Then again, why conflate violence with romance? 

To tell the truth, sometimes I miss it. 

12. 

The earliest female alchemist in China was named Fang. In the first century B.C., she was credited with the discovery of transforming mercury into silver. Fang was brilliant, her work elevating the potency of transformation: mercury to silver, death to life. 

Her life was stitched through with abuse by her husband, Cheng Wei. For years, he relentlessly bore down upon Fang to uncover the secret to her alchemy. 

Fang’s mind ultimately warped, rippling strangely like heat off stone, perhaps from the seething poison of years of mercury ingestion, or perhaps from a lifetime of abuse. Though it would

have been perfectly understandable if she had revealed her secret in hope of ending her torment, Fang never yielded to her husband. She died by suicide. 

Fang herself split a furrow for a lineage of women who chose transformation over love, or that which is disguised as love. Her mind and her hands were capable of profound change, but her true gifts may have lain in her clear vision. She did not relinquish her grip on herself. 

In the surging, living distortion of doubt, I fear that I have disappointed Fang. I have thrown myself upon a pyre in the name of cruelty, wanting so badly for it to be love that I was willing to make it so. I am glad you never cared to ask for my secrets, for I know I would have given them up freely. 

I willed violence to become romance because I believed that all it took to change one from the other was someone who wanted it badly enough. 

This is the worst of it. In the moments of suspended calm, when I can see clearly the ways in which guilt and abuse drive an obsession with alteration (of past, present, and self), I know that Fang would have understood. After all, she knew better than anyone the price of transformation, of alchemy. 

13. 

Though, I still have dreams of happening upon boys who look like you in abandoned places, strip malls and gas station parking lots. The boys are always crying. I console them, cradle them in my arms while they weep. I do not feel revulsion when I see them; only a maternal ache below my sternum. This is probably some kind of perversion. A friend of mine says that when she dreams about someone in her life crying, she always calls them to see how they’re doing. Maybe this dream is some kind of subliminal call, an electrical charge spanning thousands of miles. When I am conscious, I hope that you are suffering. When I am asleep, I hope that I am the balm. 

13. 

All this, for what? An epistolary to my own sadness is nearsighted, at best. 

Other Chinese interpretations of alchemy included the belief that death from ingestion of mercuric sulfide allowed access to the heavens: death as release. Change of form as freedom.

I have decided that the only thing that keeps people from recovering from tragedy is the story they tell themselves about it. I say this only to myself, and so I have become a storyteller. No one fully recovers from anything. I have not fully recovered from anything. It is not natural to do so. It is inhuman, a cross between science and mythology. 

Alchemy. 

This story is funny now because I say it is. This story is beautiful because I say it is. 

I don’t know how to let you go. This story will never be full enough. What are you when you are pared from bone in thin strips, ribboning into a curled pile at my feet? Just a boy. 

My favorite part of this story is that it embarasses me deeply. I have written hundreds of spiraling, senseless poems. This is one of them. Sometimes I am boundlessly happy. 

This story will go on ending and ending and ending,

​

Mayah DeMartino is an undergraduate student living in Bellingham, Washington. She cares for good food and good company. Her work has been previously published in Jeopardy Magazine and her prose was selected as a semifinalist piece in the 2020 Adroit Journal Prize for Poetry and Prose.