Every time my ten-year-old cousin trips over her own feet, she blames the floor.

She kicks it as hard as possible while her furious face juxtaposes with the cold marble.

I know she will wrong me before I correct her with logic and science because she inherited the obstinacy from me.

Before bed, I tell her a story about that time when she coiled around my leg while I fought the grist of bees.

She tells me the queen bee loved maple leaves until I tried to kill her with one. “Does trauma taste better than honey to you, now?”

Her anxious eyes speak to me “Is it because of the viscosity?”

I thought stories were meant to be lulling.

So I tell her about the said legacy of our family, about the infamous Alexandria’s genesis.

“Would you want to give up all your mahogany shaded hair for purple eyes?” I ask.

She tries to scream [a No!] but her voice breaks, seized by a narrative impulse,

She asks if she could have them both, with a loud “Tell me all about it. Tell me how surprised everybody would be on a scale of you to me.”

I tell all about it, the inevitable terror of yet another genetic mutation,

The changing eye color, from gray, to blue, to deep purple, to royal purple and then to a certain violet-blue.

Sometimes, a tremendous disappointment, other times, a painless memory. She calls it breathtaking,

But she doesn’t want me to speak of the fear and alienation that would follow.

She sips hot cocoa from my mug.

I think of a way to escape before the little one drives me insane. I take her to the garden in our yard,

Soft stillness and moonlight evenly spread. We hear waterfalls in the middle of the city.

I hold a jasmine steady for my wise beige girl while she slaps it into garish red, purple, black and yellow, changing hands and frames of reference.

“Quantum?” I imagine discrete energy packets proportional to the frequency of its radiation.

“Quarks?” I think, imagining hadrons disintegrating and gyrating about a fixed point. My mind swims around,

In all the terms she’d seen in my book the previous day.

Next morning, I drop her at school. She says she is afraid of atoms and subatomic particles.

“Aren’t those too mighty big words for dots and circles?” Nothing remains to be said.

I am all that is left behind, with an “Addio, arrivederci.”

I proceed to go to my school but I think I’ll never be gone. Our new school captain is a boy I used to like.

Now, I see him pinning girls against the walls of abusive love, intertwining his fingers with their curls, helically.

I can only visualize electrons falling into a nucleus, my atoms collapsing against my will.

There is no electrostatic force, no gravity to keep my words intact. Circles and dots are fearsome and I wish there was an easy analogy.

At home I lie on my bed with the small of my scarred back. It isn’t something we inherit,

It’s what we are rewarded. My cousin is safe at school … most likely, demonstrating fluency in her broken Italian;

So I try not to [over]think how loud cries resonate faster than the sound of gunfire. I only think of a molecule,

An atom, a quantum and the graviton of my poems. A parrot screeches,

And I recall … sound is a mechanical wave, an emblem for apprehension and struggle.