i’ve become obsessed with the word “not” as in when you ask how i’m doing i will show you the white space of a photograph there exists only one image of my mother as a child and she is scowling in it a dark already drawn around her eyes when the bombs arrived they bleached the stone and our living was only evidenced by shadows i’ve searched the exits at every party i’ve ever been to once even a deer looked through me and kept eating i got close enough to see its wound and understood my favorite rooms are made of glass and i sit for hours inside them my mother was always a good child despite and my grandmother was never a sweet woman i seem to pick all the wrong fruit at the grocery store it is the only dying i’ve held in my hands when they wheeled my grandfather away his toes pressed through the glass and a sound escaped my mother like a child they had stitched his eyes together days before to hide the nothing behind them he does not smile in the photograph either already made up of negative space his eyes back then were always set behind sunglasses as if foreshadowing their disappearance of course i have been after them for years i still look for them in the bottom of every cabinet