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BRICK 46 when I go into these other places where some of my characters live, it feels like home to me. And that’s a great feeling. Wachtel: I have a funny question. What do you wish you could have asked your great-grandmother about her experiences during the war? Mengiste: I was thinking about that the other day. I think I would ask her what it was like to come back. What did it feel like to go as a soldier, with your father’s gun, and come back as a reluctant bride to a man that you do not like, that you don’t know very well? What was that transition like? For women in warfare, women in Ethiopia and everywhere else, whether it’s these movements of liberation or revolution, when those women come back, who are they and what does that feel like to go back to the home after you’re on the front lines? I would ask her that. Wachtel: Although you know that she left that husband. Mengiste: She did leave. Wachtel: So you know that piece of the story. Mengiste: We know how she felt.
page 49
Dear Sara OCEAN VUONG What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert? — Cousin Sara, age 7 & if you follow these ants they’ll lead you back to the margins an older desert where black bones once buried are now words where I’m waving to you they survived the blast by becoming shrapnel embedded in the brain which is called learning but maybe I shouldn’t talk like this maybe I should start over Sara I messed up I’m trying to stay sober but my hands are creatures who believe in sorcery Sara the throat is also an inkwell black oil wrung through your father’s fingers after a day beneath the Buick say heartbreak & nothing will shatter say Stonehenge & watch the elephants sleep like boulders blurred in Serengeti rain it doesn’t have to make sense to be real—like your aunt Rose gone

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Dear Sara

OCEAN VUONG

What’s the point of writing if you’re just gonna force a bunch of ants to cross a white desert?

— Cousin Sara, age 7

& if you follow these ants they’ll lead you back to the margins an older desert where black bones once buried are now words where I’m waving to you they survived the blast by becoming shrapnel embedded in the brain which is called learning but maybe I shouldn’t talk like this maybe I should start over Sara I messed up I’m trying to stay sober but my hands are creatures who believe in sorcery Sara the throat is also an inkwell black oil wrung through your father’s fingers after a day beneath the Buick say heartbreak & nothing will shatter say Stonehenge & watch the elephants sleep like boulders blurred in Serengeti rain it doesn’t have to make sense to be real—like your aunt Rose gone

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