ALL LIVING THINGS MUST PASS GENETIC MATERIAL FROM PARENT TO
OFFSPRING.
My thin-lipped great-grandmother is as porcelain
and pale as a bobbed virgin Mary. The black & white
photos like trophies on my grandma’s cream
wall hold her gentle, knowing smile.
She looks like she knows me. On an island
off Maine, while high tide slams against the porch,
as downpour feeds the rotting planks, her other
children tell me stories from the ‘60s of their vintage
mother and her whiskey eyes. Then they jeer
at their father and his blank-faced stupidity with fists
of Miller Lite. Frequently my grandma cooked dinner
for her family of eight after basketball practice.
Her mother was a violently oppositional woman,
and she is no different. Both are forever encapsulated
slumped on couches, spitting insults at infants.
In the cool August before fourth grade, in her tiny black
& white kitchen, after hashbrowns and cinnamon pancakes
and Blackjack and square pizza for dinner, I ask my grandma
to tell me a story from girlhood. That night, I walk home,
proud, with my brother’s tiny fingers clasped in one hand
and my ‘sleepover bag’ in the other. Later in my dad’s
arms, I cry loyal apologies, beg for him to drive me back
so I could show her how sorry I was. I really was. In
middle school I sit with my mother on the porch and beg
her to be something else. I beg her to keep
my grandmother’s name out of her rotten mouth, I beg
her to take my eyes in hers and listen to the things she says
to me that she forgets, and I beg her to forget motherhood
and childhood, and maybe I can be her friend. She flicks
a cigarette butt onto the concrete and springs slam
the screen door behind her. In her absence, sits the genetic
template that I was just beginning to think that I knew.
I had unwillingly studied, tested, and performed
it, and in the sweltering heat of adolescence,
I decide my blood stops running with my heart.
