by Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

Passport

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas | AUG 2023 | Issue 26

—For my mother, Zita, upon hearing her terminal diagnosis *

1

Just missing
the heart
and below,
in Portuguese,
in stiff, serif type:
“portrait”;
your gaze,
far-off, staving
off reaction,
you are negotiating
the constraints
of your small frame,
fleeing again—
that intrinsic memory
running through your
veins. That punch-hole
garners passage from
South to North America,
and retires that journey
permanent, from life
to an unknown nebula.

2

And to the North,
that punch-hole —
an unknown vacancy,
mutation to a wormhole
into an eyehole for your
soul. Peer in and hear
a rare, auditory illusion:
yourself in decades’ time,
somewhere, with children
in a Midwest city,
a tenuous soap.

3

Conch shells muffed your ears,
echoes from future-past.
Daughters shake dolls.
Daughters make a mess,
Make a Tiny Tim crutch
fashioned from a willow tree
bough and it becomes you.

Now starlings encroached.
You opened your eyes to new
geographies with difficult grace.
But where was the unconditional

kind of opaque love of
idyllic, teen dreams?
Daughters weed the garden,
preemptively killing millipedes

the one on the wall, a warning;
the one that buried a place in your head,
the one that used our hair as a nest
until it scuttled out.

4

I wonder if I’d simply sprung from the
sumac, from the fields, hearing
soundly the earth tell us what
our cementing cries look like
in the air, in the mist.

What do we look like?
How are we related?

5

Almost through your heart,
yet you raced from the escarpment,
Siberian Squill clenched, a little
gazelle flashing past Anglo row homes.
A native invader fled again,
a Lithuanian girl biting her braids
like a bridle.

We are mollusks leaving shells,
husks of former selves;
we drop to the dirt,
ear to ground listening
to the earth tell you,
“none of this is yours.”

***

Editor’s note: At the author’s request, her honorarium for this piece will be donated to the Brain Tumour Foundation of Canada to support the fight against the severe form of brain cancer that took her mother’s life.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas is a Canadian-Lithuanian-American who has been experimenting with poetic language, video, and photography for 30 years. She is a migratory existential wanderer, a seeker of self and truth. She lives in Toronto, Canada.