SEVEN NOTES ON MAGIC

1. My daughter radiates everyday magic. She always rolls doubles in Monopoly. She can read minds and tell my friends’ futures. She changes the temperature of a room with her light. Lily calls her the Barbie Empath.
2. My daughter inherited these gifts from my mother, whose magic recedes as my daughter’s grows. Their souls smell the same to me: pine, earth, lavender, grace, and galaxy. I am their intermediary because the magic skipped me, which is fine by me. I’ve always been a better agent.
3. I hate the term magic realism because it implies paradox, as if magic isn’t a part of realism when in fact it’s inside of the very threads of what’s real. It is not the magic world that is different, but the medium, the sensing apparatus. Realism is only half the story.
4. The world’s true lambency is magic. Not seeing it is a type of color-blindness.
5. My mother likes to tell the story about how an angel rescued us when we got stranded on a rural highway. Her angel wore a cowboy hat and revived a car that would never be revived again. When we drove past where he had left him, he was nowhere to be found: another fact from her biography.
6. She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed.
7. My mother tells me her dreams and her days, which I read like runes. I use their science to make maps of the real world in poems and stories, mirrors made of clock parts. The light through the torn blinds flicker when she talks, pensions and dragons sewn with the same thread.

She believed…existed. —Clarice Lispector