I was lost to the wind at eighteen.
My bags were already packed—
they had been since she died, y’know.
I grabbed them off the top shelf,
got in the car and left.

When you found me in the corner
of the park, just south of the Eiffel Tower,
I was a trembling china doll
in a bloody red dress, thrown
out because of all the cracks.
What’s wrong? you whisper. I cried,
I was always the sick woman’s granddaughter,
but now she’s gone and I don’t know who I am.

You were a perfectly still soldier,
having put up an eighteen-year
fight with greedy white blood cells,
a leukemia almost too powerful
to beat.
But you did it;
I asked how and you said maybe because
it was all you’d ever known,
since you were two and crying and hooked up to IVs.
But now you’re paralyzed with fear,
God, if it were to happen again—
you couldn’t do it again.

So we call a little flat in the Arrondissements
our house of fears and hide out together.
You bring me roses and tea sets
and try to figure out who I really am.
When you shudder at the witching hour,
I hold you and help you lose yourself,
if only for a little while.

But I still see my grandmother in each of
the old women with the scarves
around their heads,
like Elizabeth Taylor in the movie
no one can remember.
Your heart still drops when you see
a gleaming white head,
like the cheap Magic 8 balls that tell
your future for a shake.

There are whispers of a
lost generation that hid here once,
Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein,
but when we huddle together in our
starry prison, I know that we’re the
expats, the wanderers, the generation
lost to the wind and the wars.