Airing Out Ghosts: Locked in Different Alphabets by Doris Fiszer

crocodile
o   p   e   n   s         w   i   d   e
shows its teeth

our   laughter
ping                        pongs
into

semi-
darkness

Throughout, Fiszer alludes to the haunting of familial ghosts. In “Turn of a Phrase,” she writes, “The dead keep coming back – / in the turn of a phrase, / a stranger’s walk, / the certain way a head bends.”

The second section, “My Father Andrzej,” is by far the longest. Within, Fiszer further develops the theme of familial haunting, revisiting moments of caring for her father in his old age. In “What My Departed Do,” she writes, “my dead linger / in every crevice of this room / make unwound clocks toll / in unsynchronized hours.” In “Cardinal,” she shares a dispelling of stagnant spirits: “I pull back your curtains / open your window / clear out winter’s ghost.” Through a series of nursing home vignettes, Fiszer reveals a complicated love between herself and her father, sharing his stories of building V2 rockets in the Dora concentration camp in “His Story in Bits and Pieces”, as well as heated arguments, blame and forgiveness, as in “Retreat”: “Before I see him again / I imagine an artist / painted over our last encounter, / stippled softer tones / onto a fresh canvas.” Pivoting from this bitter recollection, Fiszer deftly shows the tender ache of loss in “Snapshot 2” (“I rest in the curve of my father’s shoulder. / Salt scents the crevices of his skin.”) and in “Lately, Everything is Language” (“My heart carries you. / A noun, any noun / an anchor.”).

At times, these pieces convey a straightforward, biographical recollection; in other places, most notably in the third section, “My Mother, Sasanka, Means Wild Flower,” they jump around between narrators. The changing perspective threatens to disorient the reader in places, though it also echoes the brain fog of grief and the confusion of sorting through cluttered, painful memories, not all of which are one’s own. In “My Mother Said,” Fiszer briefly adopts her mother’s memory as her own, writing: “Before my childhood snapped shut like a fox cage / I helped my mother cut dough circles / for Christmas Eve pierogi.”

Reading this collection feels like a private peek into a family album at the end of the night, where Fiszer tells the whole and heavy truth behind each picture. Underneath each scrapbook, Locked in Different Alphabets is a book about confronting one’s own family history, tidying and untying the guilt, indignance and grief within.

 
 
Liam Burke (he/him/himbo) lives in Ottawa, Canada, on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe land. He is most recently the co-author of machine dreams with natalie hanna (collusion books, 2021) and Orbital Cultivation with Manahil Bandukwala (collusion books, forthcoming). His poems have most recently appeared in the Daily Drunk, Savant-Garde, the Jupiter Review, and long con magazine, and are forthcoming in INKSOUNDS and Sledgehammer Lit. He has been the Assistant Director of the Sawdust Reading Series, co-host of Literary Landscapes on CKCU, and performs in the band Moratorium. He studies online radicalization at Carleton University where he is pursuing a master’s degree in philosophy.

 

ARC HITS THE HEART HARD.

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