Her parents can’t live
in their house anymore.
The stairs, the driveway
coated with snow,
the hill,
her mom’s hip and dad’s knees,
their diminishing
pensions.
So they decide to sell.
Empty the house,
clean and paint it
so it looks anonymous and bright.
They excise all things personal
except the piano.
Her great-aunt’s piano.
Her great-aunt loved music;
everyone in her family loves music.
Her brother plays metal guitar; her uncles, banjo; her dad guiro when
the spirit moves him.
All of us have crowded around those keys.
But her parents won’t have space
in the apartment they’ll move to after the sale.
It is stairless,
with a metal bar to grip in the shower and
a sidewalk they won’t have to shovel.
So her parents offer the piano
to the buyers they find for the house.
The buyers say yes, they like the look:
the piano is large, old and elegant.
Mahogany.
Only later, a few days before the sale,
the day the government changes
the buyers also change their minds.
Tell her parents to get rid of it.
Her father tries to sell or give it away.
To music schools and churches,
acquaintances and friendly, anonymous accounts online.
He promises to borrow a truck
to deliver it.
A few people call and say they’re interested
but then they change their minds too.
The buyers of the house want it gone.
Her parents realize they’ll have to throw it away. A piano
that is nearly a hundred years old, that supposedly
survived the war.
Her father is resourceful. He says maybe he can
peel off the ivory keys and sell them.
Her mother puts her fists in her ears.
At the dual-language school where her cousin works,
men in black vests with white print try to break down the door,
try to find children to disappear.
Afterwards, she silences her son
when he speaks Spanish in the street.
Her father realizes he must use a sledgehammer
to break the piano,
to turn it into timber,
into disposable bits.
But the hammer slips from his hands.
He cannot destroy it, cannot
tear its keys with pliers,
cannot pull them like teeth.
He has a friend who is new to this country,
who watched
his own country crumble
with a few strokes of a pen.
He tells her father he can stomach it,
that you can stomach anything if you have enough
need.
Says once a thing is in pieces,
it gets easier to forget
what was and wasn’t there.
