We don't sleep anymore, don't even lie down. Tell me about days before the war, before you endured Camp Minidoka, whole bushels of history spilling forth. Tell me about your wedding ring, about dancing in orchards with my grandfather, about train tracks. I've lived on the other side of winter, forgot how real weather feels—the furnace's breath, the showerhead my only reminder of sky. Did he ever gulp whiskey and stumble home after dark? Did you ever steal fruit at dawn? When the ice melts, our house fills with perfume as the skunks bloom, as pollen swarms venomous in our night parlor. What color were those trees at midnight? Do they survive now that you are so far from the farm? What about the atom bomb, poison intoxicating us all like orange blossoms now that your husband rests in that tiny box of ashes at your bedside? We can't sleep like horses, don't shed our skins like leaves, veined and diaphanous in the outlines of grief. We stand under dark canopies, arms waving the wind away—we see one another like we used to, not like we used to. Now the orchards have all been uprooted, now the orchards stand where they've always been.

When I dream, I see an open meadow from my father's living room windows, the house drained of color except for the sunrise, a splash of fire like an angel's name spoken for the first time since awaking underground. When my father dreams, he rides through the ocean, perhaps— hooves pounding the beach like a pair of fists, like his father's fists against that spot where the moon leaves a zag of sky on the carpet every night. Those things I know in the dark are just between me and those emptied stables of night, between me and all those lonely houses I cannot remember while conscious. When the body is quiet, the heart may roam where it desires—so why can't we close the blinds, relish the darkness? Why can't we open all our windows so the birds might fly inside?