Eight-seater suburban parked deep-deep in the Wal-Mart lot, legal twenty-four hours or so they say, though every time we see a car coming too close we pull the sleeping bags up, stay strict-still and make like a backseat of junk.
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You can come in now, they say, holding open the door between the waiting room and the inner sanctum of the ER, and I stand, smoothing my wispy summer dress and unsticking my bare legs from the vinyl chair where I’ve waited…
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We are nine when our mom enrolls us in the Fairlanes Young America youth duckpin bowling league. Duckpin bowling is Baltimore’s bastardized version of ten-pin bowling, played on a regular-length lane but with squat little pins and hard rubber balls swirled with marble or speckled with glitter.
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After my dad falls down the hill and into the road at sunset and is nearly hit by a speeding car, it takes him fifteen minutes to limp back up to the house. I hear him call my name from the kitchen in a strange, fierce tone I have never heard before.
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Lately I feel like a mirror that got shattered and glued back together. To fill the hours, I’ve been reading about the Boötes Void. It’s a kind of oil-stain in space, an absence of stars some 330 million light years in diameter.
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Growing up, I was the only girl on both sides of the family. Most of the time, it didn’t seem to matter much. I followed my brothers and cousins when they went outside to shoot the BB gun in our grandparents’ backyard in small town Wisconsin.
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My friend Stacy was headed to freshman orientation, and it was 1985 on a day in May and the Midwest sky was showing off and Stacy was getting ready to pull out and the days stretched before me, empty and long, so I said yes and rode shotgun a hundred miles or so north out of our hometown.
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Bear, 1a. transitive verb: to accept or allow oneself to be subjected to. I couldn’t bear my mother’s screams the night we learned my father died. The 11:00 PM news anchor announced the accident: a pedestrian (no name until the family could be identified) killed in the crosswalk in front of Sullivan University.
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Seventeen, and I am dancing. Spinning, spiraling, suffocating. Seeing heaven when I’m hungry enough. Setting little fires around the neighborhood until each green lawn is singed with yellow.
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1.
The only thing capitalism is selling that I’ve ever wanted to buy is “illness.”
A woman opens and closes window curtains inside the tight walls of her childhood bedroom. A green orb explodes behind her clenched eyelids—chemical stars packed into shells, propelled by gunpowder and flame.
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Good love.
The email request was that you write about good love for a Valentine’s Day reading event.
Summer 2019 was like the opening to DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime,” full of heat and anticipation. My hot girl summer. Two years out of my relationship, and one year out of my old job—both of which had felt like certain stagnation—I indulged myself.
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Resplendent in clearance sale plastic go-go boots and polyester mini-dresses, my teen aunts, Paula and Brenda, use the battered handle on the kitchen cabinet drawer to pop bottle tops—sometimes ice-cold Coca Cola or Pepsi—but mostly RC Cola with salted peanuts shoved inside the neck to make both a drink and a treat.
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Crouched in my driveway, I inspect the fender recently pried loose by a streetlight. I wouldn’t have backed into the pole if I hadn’t stopped for lunch, hadn’t finally dropped off the dry cleaning, hadn’t shoved an oversized envelope into the postbox.
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When my son, Cyrus, was a year and a half old, I took him and his older sister, Maya, to Karachi, Pakistan, where we ended up staying for five months. It was 2003, some months after the U.S. occupied Iraq, and for a time my American life no longer felt tenable. We lived with my father in the home I grew up in, across the street from my mother and her husband.
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A verifiable fact: The Army discharged my father from his tour in Vietnam three days early.
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I am thirty-seven weeks pregnant with a sex drive that suddenly has no limits, and everything turns me on. How have I become the most sensual of beings? I’ve almost never written poetry; there was that one time, but I was sixteen and thought I was in love.
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The neighbors can see my nipples; I’m sure of this. I’m particularly convinced that they have been seen by the person who lives to the right of me, as my kitchen window looks directly into his home.
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