People like to tell me I was born during a funeral.

My mother went into labor on the grass beside the open grave. She was rushed behind a headstone for privacy as the closing prayers were made over my great uncle's casket. When the military men made that ear-splitting honorary shot in the air, my aunt from behind the angel called out "It's a boy!" and I let out my first cry. The rain just poured on and on, washed me clean, and the reception became a birthday celebration. Guests peeled off their black layers to congratulate my parents and cradle me, a miracle born beneath the shadow of death.

My father, always and ever the story teller, tells it differently: he swears he saw my great-uncle's ghost watching, approvingly, as they walked out of the cemetery holding me. Told me God took my sight because my uncle never wanted me to see the world in the way it was, a last parting wish before making his way to – well, somewhere. Not heaven, Mom insists. Because men who think they're better than God don't spend the afterlife with him. Mom says it her way: she and my dad drove to the hospital early that morning and never went to the funeral.

And me, not knowing what I want to believe.

People like to tell me I was born during a funeral.

My mother went into labor on the grass beside the open grave. She was rushed behind a headstone for privacy as the closing prayers were made over my great uncle's casket. When the military men made that ear-splitting honorary shot in the air, my aunt from behind the angel called out "It's a boy!" and I let out my first cry. The rain just poured on and on, washed me clean, and the reception became a birthday celebration. Guests peeled off their black layers to congratulate my parents and cradle me, a miracle born beneath the shadow of death.

My father, always and ever the story teller, tells it differently: he swears he saw my great-uncle's ghost watching, approvingly, as they walked out of the cemetery holding me. Told me God took my sight because my uncle never wanted me to see the world in the way it was, a last parting wish before making his way to – well, somewhere. Not heaven, Mom insists. Because men who think they're better than God don't spend the afterlife with him. Mom says it her way: she and my dad drove to the hospital early that morning and never went to the funeral.

And me, not knowing what I want to believe.

***

When they fight in the night I always assume at first they are part of a dream. I am dreaming about sitting in a bus station and someone is listening too loud to something tuneless, mostly a beat, and the beat combines with the warbles of the street pigeons, and the warbles combine with the breaks of a bus or a car or a taxi, probably a bus because I can feel the rumble of the diesel engine beneath my feet, and all this blends with the voices of my parents and I think we are all arguing in a bus station and I wonder where we're going to.

"Saint Ted," she's crying. "Saint fucking Ted, he knows all the rules. He knows there are no rules! Because – because – he's an artist."

"Enough with the dramatics."

"Is this what I'm supposed to be? The bitch who loves literature but can't appreciate it because she's so wrapped up in the technicalities? Apparently I'll never understand language because I'm just too close-minded, is that it?"

"Ellen. Just because I write someone doesn't mean she's always you."

"Fuck you. Go get stoned with your book club, go reach some different plain of being and fuck yourself to nirvana. At least you'll get a poem out of it."

There are slamming doors, for there will always be slamming doors, and my mother is gone for the night. The house screams its silences. There are noises on the other side of my wall.

Leticia the foster child is crying.

***

And my father.

My father the poet, my father the wordsmith. My father is Mexican hot chocolate when it snows, Bruce Springsteen when it rains (Listen to that lyric, David, just listen to that spectacular phrase). My father dreams in words.

Words tumbling over each other, words racing to the finish line. Words fornicating in rings over other words to create new ones. I watched hate and love combine to form Ellen.

"We met at her great-uncle's reading," he's telling me as we sit in the back of the theater where his favorite jazz band is playing. "Guy wrote memoirs, kind of pretentious, not extremely talented. I can tell you these things." Things he can't tell her. "The one that killed himself, you know, right before you were born."

I know the one. How can I not? His end was my beginning.

"Anyway." The soft scuffling sounds below his voice tell me he is ripping apart his playbill. He always does this. My father the creator, my father the destroyer. "She helped organize the reading, sold copies of his book afterwards. She was loud and she was bold. A student at the university studying linguistics. She was memorizing a thesaurus. That was why I wanted her."

"Wanted?" I go.

"Want," he corrects. "Want."

On the train back out of the city he's reading me some of his Whitman when he falls asleep, dozing against the motion, his voice drifting on "For every atom belonging to me as good beeeeeloooongs to –"

I am in the midst of his dreams again. There is my mother, the only version of my mother he still dreams about: Young, thin, wearing homemade mittens and hats. Sometimes the word vibrant follows her like a lovesick puppy. And I see him as he used to be, maybe as he wants to be: Hands in his pockets, permanently slumped, a stupid grin so as not to intimidate. They are leaning against a window somewhere, a diner perhaps, and the glass is fogged with winter. He takes his hands out of his pockets and cradles her waist, which I have never seen before, circles it like she's next to nothing and he just wants her to exist within him. Beneath everything inches a single word, red, slanted; it makes its way between them and sits, stagnant, a bomb just waiting to explode.

The word is stale.

***

When I was a kid, six or seven and old enough to be fooled, my mom typed out my father's first book of poetry into my language then taped the pieces to the walls. Feel the story, she told me though his poems told no story at all. I stumbled down staircases, fingers feeling the words embedded in the railing; I crawled along the floor of the piano room; I followed his silent voice beneath tables and through chairs, down the driveway and up the mailbox post. She'd left a bar of chocolate inside, I could smell it through the thin wrapping, and I felt the phrase taped along the side of it I love you I love you I love you. I don't remember the story of my father's poems, just that insisting declaration of her love, as if she needed to, as if it was hard for her to love the damaged son.

She dreams in shapes.

Leticia in Mom's dreams is a shining rhombus, torn apart down the middle; Dad, a never-ending circle; and I am a rectangle, solid and oblong. Words appear on our shapes like tattoos: Justified, empowered, indignant. As I read them in her dream I feel the Braille in my mind. And I am shame; just shame.

Sometimes in her dreams she is back in the hospital. My tiny rectangular figure is brought in and the doctor is telling her things and she is sobbing. How and why, why and how? He'll never see the sunset, she is thinking. And he'll never see the moon.