Farmville

By Hannah Olsson

To sleep, my grandmother, my farmor, tells me to imagine I'm staring at a dark hole, and so I do: one cavernous mass settled just inside the fleshy part of my throat that swallows Swedish most of the time, that knit-wrapped space where I can only speak through cross-stitches, building up conversations like the pixel homestead farmor cultivates on the couch while the lottery creates lucky wallpaper over the bridge of her pursed lips;

"here I am milking the cows"..."here I am pulling the carrots"..."now it is time to fish";

we spend our days in this timeless space that feels very much like the dark holes my farmor visits avidly in her sleep, a place where we are only as fluent with each other as the extent of her gardening tools;

"and now I pick tomatoes"..."and now I go to town"...

and I nod, the way one nods when they want to say so much more.

Hannah Olsson is an MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing; her work explores the monstrous beauty in grief, anxiety, pansexual love, and other all-encompassing modes of longing.

Art by Hannah Olsson.