The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: How to Dress a Fish by Abigail Chabitnoy

LESSONS IN ARTICULATION

He didn’t tell us when he learned what it meant,
that they took their words from them.
If he were not an accountant, my father,
he might have been a historian. A fisherman. Or
he might have been nobody. He might have been unsettled.
Father, did you have these questions, when you were young with only
your cousin, your aunt?
Father, did your father know?
Did your father tell you,
how he and his brother were called half-breed,
how he didn’t know his father?
Did you read to your mother?
Did you read to your dog, until you could pronounce the words properly?
Did you eat Hershey’s Chocolate toast sandwiches with your father?
Did your father read aloud from his bible, or
did he keep his words from you?
Father, did you dream then of salt sweeping your lungs, of sand
and volcanic rock beneath
your feet, or snow?
Did you watch the birds as a boy for Company?
Did you try to give them names?
Father, did you play Indians?
Or were you cowboys?
How did you feel, the way your father asked your mother
for a sandwich and a beer,
and a beer,
like a man?
Mother says these things skip a generation.

I don’t remember learning these words—
deprivation, decimation, assimilation,
relocation.
I don’t remember Carlisle in my school books. Was it something
you showed me, Father, that summer
we toured all the battlefields?
If he were not an accountant, my father,
he might have been a historian.
But there was no value in these things,
no way he could convey.
I don’t know when I learned what it meant,
they took our words from us.