Asylum

When I was a child, I stopped eating
and had a hard time climbing the stairs

to our apartment, my mother cursing
the tiny elevator that rarely seemed to lift us

to the fourth floor, the narrow, dark corridors,
apartments secured by bars and multiple locks.

She tried to feed me raw eggs in chocolate milk,
the yellow wisps spiraling in the shape of an ‘S.’

I think my parents were terrified that I might
disappear, just like everyone else.

Mrs Scherzer, on the top floor,
had a small apartment aflutter

with parakeets, the cages always open.
She gave them names of the people

in her village and each of them held a story,
like Hans with his stutter and Gisela, the soprano.

When I visited, she would play Beethoven
on her small record player, tell me stories

about her childhood growing up near Vienna.
The only place she felt safe was in her fantasies—

a forest filled with friendly sprites,
a cottage with all the books she wanted to read—

the imagination also a refuge, with walls built
from the bones of generations,

the bones cleaving to their stories
to keep the walls together.