I don’t remember when
my dad first said the
little green boat was dangerous, the tide
 
a treacherous thing of
mutiny, prepared to silence
those reliant on it, as sure as the sun rises.
 
If we were to, say,
tip over our tiny vessel, on an ocean
 
or lake, or river, what then?
We might find ourselves sleeping with
the fishes that night, unable to right the
rim or swim to safety, each paddle
 
lost to the depths of
the sea (or something like it). Now, your
experience may differ — your tongue
 
may click, tell me to rearrange
 
my thoughts on this story, a front for the
paranoid fears of a father. Maybe these letters
are my internalization, the result of his desire to
protect his daughters, form
 
a safety net around us in our perilous canoe.
                        

We had been hiking,
but now it was a climb,
the difficulty of which
did not deter us. We
felt the heat, the dust
on our faces, sweat trickling
into our smiles, like the time
we traveled by ourselves.
 
As we near the zenith,
a boy approaches on a dirt bike,
asks for our code names.
I say, We don’t have code names,
like I told that toddler we were not
who she thought we were.
Only this time, it is a we
sisters share over friends.
 
The boy disappears.
 
We complete our ascent
and meet a woman
standing on the ridge
dressed in layers, as if
she is a jogger, as if she
doesn’t feel the sun, as if
she’ll never melt the way
we do. I think, she is my
mother, but she is Black.
 
Her box braids, accented
with gold, extend below
her waist, and if I were not
dreaming, I might have stared,
in awe, at her beauty. Instead,
I watch her eyebrows raise,
and I know she is thinking
we complicated our journey
 
but her pride seeps out
beneath her skepticism,
as if to say, Thank God
you’ve finally arrived.
                        

She texted it, actually, which lends more
to its permanence (and her resolve)
than would’ve been evident in speech.
 
Around 6:30 a.m., I awoke to the vibration
of my phone, an alarm as unexpected
as the earthquake that woke my sister,
 
a thousand miles away. Only her message
had been sent at 5:12 a.m. (my time),
and I had slept through that disturbance,
 
unlike her. As soon as I inquire about safety,
she begins to backpedal, claims
she overreacted because she’d been rattled
 
awake without warning, unaccustomed
now to that phenomena once
so commonplace in both our lives.
 
I imagine she expected me, like our mother,
to scoff at her insecurity and remind her
I survived much worse, on the second floor
 
of an Alaska school, in a room full
of sixth-graders, on a dark November
morning, 16 months ago.
 
I bet she didn’t anticipate my surprise
at her use of The F Word (the only curse
with such a lofty, unmistakable euphemism),
 
but she is about to turn 30, married
with three kids, and this is a revelation:
that my carefully worded sister and I
 
can in fact speak the same language.
I see my mother on social media, saying,
“I didn’t know Utah had earthquakes,”
 
but she’s a scientist, so I suspect
her follow-up of, “How long did it last?”
is another of her competitive measures.
 
My brother-in-law taunts, “I’m glad
it didn’t wake me up,” because
he was already at work, most likely,
 
and he didn’t see the 5 a.m. message
to me, from his wife, which said,
“I may never sleep again”
 
(this, said by the mother of three children
between ages 1 and 7, whom I didn’t think
hoped for sleep anymore, anyway).
 
So, although I still can’t quite hear
the F word in my sister’s voice,
I can still feel the momentary terror
 
of a life with children, shaken —
albeit in different contexts —
and the aftershocks left in its wake.