Try this: today comes an article in Italian

from a friend. Language looks meaning

less. But there, it crackles

steps again. Sap longs for the tree but the name is 

lost and there are many trees out there

some smelling like honey

some smelling like shit and some 

bearing fruits, bursting. Step right   cross left   left again    and left

Every island its fascist 

every tree its name in the colonizer’s tongue.

Worse to believe such a thing exists 

as original name? Step right:

a corner store. Step left: 

another. I hear three languages 

while buying a beer, none of them 

of my ancestors. One is 

my tongue, the colonizer.

Every spring I believe my fig tree dead

dies in the Brooklyn winter

dies of the Brooklyn winter

and though my love for figs is deep

I prefer them dried.

It takes three phone calls to three cemeteries

to find my great-grandmother. Her name

misspelled in the records, but I take a chance 

on a hunch. A half hour’s walk from here

Vita’s bones rest silently, or they’re divining.

Emily Brandt (b. 1980, she/they) is a Brooklyn-based poet and interdisciplinary artist of Sicilian, Polish and Ukrainian descent. She’s a co-founding editor of No, Dear, curator of the LINEAGE series at Wendy’s Subway, member of the video art collective Temp. Files, and teacher and instructional coach at The Boerum Hill School for International Studies.