Amsterdam

Megan Fernandes

Sometimes the mythologies of a city are true— like when I see a blond man bob for red apples in the street selling records side by side with a black cat wound in a cushion, deep in dream. Josh says he does not want to go see Anne Frank, that this kind of tourism depresses him, the one where the demonstration of grief is like a voyeuristic tug at suffering that is not yours to possess. How do you eat after that, he seems sad today. How do you stay alive. When he was young, he visited Auschwitz and told me not to go because it had a gift shop and that made him angry and nobody knows how to grieve in public, how to make public space for loss unless you can make money off of it but really there is something else to his anger, the child abandoned, the residue of a young girl’s life turned into a petting zoo—this he cannot take.

I have become like my mother where I don’t need sleep in a new city anymore, immune to time shifts, I just wander and buy fruit and almonds and a good loaf of bread and today, some fresh juice, skipping museums though I want to go back to see Anne Frank’s house this time, because this time, I am a woman and last time, I was a girl and when you are a girl, all you see is another girl and when you are a woman, all you see is history careening towards a girl who you cannot protect.

In my Amsterdam apartment, I find a ceramic plate with its rim edge folded in five places where a violet petal has been painted at its compression. In it, I pour some olive oil and a little bit of salt and sit on the white couch overlooking the new neon green blooms gathering on a branch outside the large window directly facing an apartment of a bookish couple, the kind who forget they have bodies and think they are better than those who are bodily which is most everyone else in the world but the girl in the couple is lying and misses the small animal inside her crying for her breakfast. What she needs is food, not Yeats. What she needs is your fingers. The apartment has tulips and pink depression glass and cacti of all heights like reptilian skyscrapers.

I am thinking of Harlem in Amsterdam. Sometimes I go there to hide. I go there to eat at a bistro owned by a lady named Fay. Fay is older with light eyes and her whole family works this place and her grandson is behind the bar and he’s just seventeen and a soccer player and this week got into Dartmouth and I ask her if she thinks he’ll be happy, being a black kid at Dartmouth, but Fey is Queen Fey and knows better than to answer questions about race at dinner time especially in front of all these nice people.

In Amsterdam, the cold sunlight of April grows the dandelions in the gutter and when you get to 263 to see Anne Frank’s house (only from the outside) the building is not as tall as you remember and you wonder what the ceilings were like for a young girl and you imagine her face, I imagine her face and think maybe something bad happened to Josh when he was a kid and you see her face in the window, her face lit up in story, her face in love and in fear, and you are in Amsterdam when the American president bombs Syria. You say American president as if you are not an American and as if he is not your president. You promised that he would not make his way into any poem, but here he is bombing Syria and here is he is in your poem and here is her face spreading all over Europe and here is your face, Anne, spreading all over Europe and here is your face, your face, your face.