THE FIRST TREE I EVER KNEW BY NAME
by Elisa Luna Ady
I was a we and we were born liars. Decorative
and doing nothing. Is it sacrilege to say so? Every
memory we touched flinching away from us,
widening, ringed. I moved through tenses as through
summers. My father guiding me up to the top floor
of the Hilton Bayfront, where he beheld the season
in his insulated boots, the gridlocked glitter, never
entering a suite. What shall I make my altars out of
now? King palms soldered to nightsky. Palms, the Pluto
of our arid ecosystem. The first tree I ever knew by name
I knew because a girl in my class had been named
after that tree. Her honeyed hair, her rich misspellings.
Sounds we cast into the ether and around the corner
someone was getting married, circling the thick-set fig tree
in a blooming dress before the city fenced it in for all
we trampled its root system. I am introduced to my desert’s
ornaments, but only in retrospect: jacaranda, carrotwood,
eucalyptus, bottlebrush, Brazilian pepper tree. Was it
an avocado tree or a lemon tree we stole from, edging
the wall and loosening another clump of produce
from the neighbor’s garden? Or was it the Hilton Mission
Valley? Gaslamp Quarter? I saw her name printed in a book
and thought, No, that’s not right. It was a two-pronged
Tipuana tipu in that church parking lot where I practiced
my turns. It was the year I grew another father. It was
Zacoya. Not sequoia. In the Sierra Nevada mountains,
I scaled that ancient monument with my eyes and I saw
her little face, widening, ringed, reaching out at me.
and doing nothing. Is it sacrilege to say so? Every
memory we touched flinching away from us,
widening, ringed. I moved through tenses as through
summers. My father guiding me up to the top floor
of the Hilton Bayfront, where he beheld the season
in his insulated boots, the gridlocked glitter, never
entering a suite. What shall I make my altars out of
now? King palms soldered to nightsky. Palms, the Pluto
of our arid ecosystem. The first tree I ever knew by name
I knew because a girl in my class had been named
after that tree. Her honeyed hair, her rich misspellings.
Sounds we cast into the ether and around the corner
someone was getting married, circling the thick-set fig tree
in a blooming dress before the city fenced it in for all
we trampled its root system. I am introduced to my desert’s
ornaments, but only in retrospect: jacaranda, carrotwood,
eucalyptus, bottlebrush, Brazilian pepper tree. Was it
an avocado tree or a lemon tree we stole from, edging
the wall and loosening another clump of produce
from the neighbor’s garden? Or was it the Hilton Mission
Valley? Gaslamp Quarter? I saw her name printed in a book
and thought, No, that’s not right. It was a two-pronged
Tipuana tipu in that church parking lot where I practiced
my turns. It was the year I grew another father. It was
Zacoya. Not sequoia. In the Sierra Nevada mountains,
I scaled that ancient monument with my eyes and I saw
her little face, widening, ringed, reaching out at me.
Elisa Luna Ady is a writer from Southern California. Her work is featured or forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, The Best Small Fictions, matchbook, and elsewhere. She’s a current MFA+MA candidate at Northwestern University, where she's at work on a short story collection and a novel. She writes about the sanctity of grandmas and liquor stores.