I. Alcohol 

My father’s father bottled everything.  

French Canadian and mean.  

We don’t talk about it—Daddy turned out 

alright. We don’t talk about it but 

it runs in the family, drips then branches 

down glass, then pools. My sister, me, 

our children, we are drenched in 80-proof. 

I am 19 and angry: The irritating, self-righteous, 

contradictory, indulgent voice in my head 

speaks when it is very seldom spoken to. 

I make every attempt to drown it. 

(What are you having tonight?) 

Please, I’d like Gin. 

In college at a party, I chased 

every word with a drink. 

I popped corks and caps 

with strong teeth, clutched cans, bottles, 

glasses with angry hands and hold on tight; 

I shouted and pressed my body against walls. 

Wanted to taste that bubbly scuttling inside 

my mouth, cold and burning simultaneously.  

(There’s beer in the kitchen if you want…) 

I need to go ‘ome. 

(Oh, come on.) 

I don’ wanna talk about it. 

*** 

I remember going to New York City  

In college: 

I step off the subway and teeter on a wild precipice. 

Spanish Harlem whirls for me, the quivering heat above 

the city pavement and the tartness in my nose,

this new world. Sun on my cheeks like meteor fire 

and then someone whirs past me on a bicycle, 

and I am caught in the intricate web of the city. 

West and east are monogramed into sulfur exhaust  

so I follow it’s cloud, and the movement of everyone  

else. Pollution and noise pile heavy on my tongue, and  

people are moving but I am not. The push-pull of their bodies

and no rest for them weaving solid and fast past me, standing

by a café, map flimsy in my fist, and there’s nothing familiar

about all this. I imagine finding a street-side tavern, saddling up

to the bar, pretending I belong, and ordering whiskey. 

Everything slows down. 

(You are not as grown as you think you are.) 

Maybe not. 

(Littles girls shouldn’t be looking for love in a bar.) 

(Who says I’m not here just to drink? 

*** 

II. Love 

William, on the bus ride home, who 

kissed me—the first. I remember now my hands 

were on my knees. There were new  

blooms on the red bud trees at the bus stop 

where he put his mouth on mine. 

It was eighth grade and I thought I loved him. 

Tony, who once slapped my face  

when we were in middle school, then grinned 

and licked the fresh pink print across my cheek, 

turned out to be muscled and tanned from 

landscaping during his high school summers. 

My senior year, we fucked for the first time 

in the park, the stone wall scraping my palms. 

(Isn’t that the same boy who touched your breasts in fifth grade?)

No, he is in a relationship now, and he hits her. 

Then Aaron, looming over me. Thin, but something 

burly about his walk. The broad space  

between his shoulder blades made him seem strong, 

so I let him have sex with me.

all I remember is my hands making prints 

on his freckled back.  

What I Noticed About Myself Afterwards: 

1. I slept on my stomach every night for years after. Or curled on my side with a fist below my

navel. 

2. My hair grew silkier, I stopped using conditioner, wore more red. 

3. My jeans fit a little tighter; I listened to more J. Cole, feeling edgier. Kissed with my hand on

the backs of their necks. 

***  

In the city, a woman saunters toward me, gold hoops  

and red wrap dress, asking in Spanish if I want something, 

some thing. I dive under her gesturing brown arm and then I am 

tracing purple, green, and yellow figures in graffiti. Somehow 

there is vibration under my fingers, hot taps and needle pricks 

as I wind around a treble clef. I move slowly into an alleyway, 

where scuttly things work their ways into corners. 

I am alone in the narrow space, in the quiet.  

I think about how there is never any music in Papa’s hospital room 

save for his pirouetting thumb in my palm. We draw loopy hearts 

on each other’s hands. I want to tell him how much I love him, 

but can’t.  

***  

I cannot listen to J. Cole anymore. 

(Why not?) 

Why? Well 

Bobby loved the sticky, smooth beat, the  

Straight up, now tell me do you really wanna love me forever? of the chorus.  

(Didn’t he break up with you ten months later?) 

It’s stupid, really. 

But maybe Bobby is a whole different story. 

(Care to tell…?)

They say it’s easier to start a new habit  

than it is to break an old one. 

I would breathe in the smell of his neck, 

the warmth and the sourness of tobacco, 

like cracking knuckles. The calcium-white 

And slender fingers, the irresistible pop 

of joints and the slug of air to bone. 

I heard his crackly cigarette voice as a constant

fidget, saying, “Have a drink with me,” and putting  

a chilled bottle in my hands. 

***  

In the hospital in Connecticut, my Papa rests 

in his thin Jonny gown. He is grayed  

with old age, and my grandmother watches him breathe; we

count the tiny spiders scurrying across the windowsill. I make

three, four, five shifts of my weight and see  

bruised lumps on his wrists, injection sights of needles.

I decide that I will build strength for him.  

my mother and I, we will take him ripened peaches

and honey buns and coffee, and he will live. 

We will visit him twice a week and he will fight 

to find the strength in his legs again.  

***  

“I will love someday until I lose myself,” I wrote in my journal.

III. Dust 

Today, I clean. 

Fold a rag into a haphazard square and rub 

the rungs on my headboard. Sweep over  

the bureau, the mirror, my desk. I shuffle around my

bedroom and douse the finished wood in Pledge. The air

smells like lemons but I still feel dust in my nostrils, and

therefor scrub harder, polish the baseboards, vacuum last. I

must make things very clean. 

The dust will remind me of them… 

If I do not keep things clean, I would remember too much.

(You weren’t raised that way.) 

I know. 

(Put yourself out of your misery.) 

So I bleach, scrub, bleed. Each person

In my life is collected inside of me,  

makes my throat rough. I cough up 

- Joe’s hands on my neck. 

- Emily kissing me in a parking lot and calling me baby. 

- The boys in seventh grade science class who poked my sides, said, “What a fatty.” -

My sister tensing her shoulders as I reach for a hug. 

- Bobby’s tattoo of the first four letters of my name on his knee. 

(Why only four? Were you not that memorable?) 

I told him not to make me permanent. 

In one week I will leave for college again, and I need to wipe everything away.

There are memories like dust in my parents’ house. 

I taste them all, tart and dry, they choke me. I wipe dust 

onto the floor and vacuum a second time. 

(Just go.) 

***  

We stand around Papa’s bed. It is draining here.  

For a moment I sway a bit. Standing  

at his bedside, the air feels slow and muggy. It is like 

being in the city—I feel the brush of someone’s pack 

against my arm, someone racing time to be somewhere else, 

kicking up a swirl of dirt and dust that jogs me. 

The city moves, the pace picks up again 

when I clutch my silk change purse to my chest. I stroke its 

lavender veins, bold orange thread, and lean 

against a brick apartment building, remembering 

that there might not always be words for this 

kind of pain, fast and big and smelling like rot. 

That I could just stand beside Papa and breathe. 

that there is life in that which is small, and powerful. 

I know I must visit him again soon. 

***  

IV. My Mind 

I wonder about my body. About how it has survived 

through all that I’ve done to it.  

(You are nothing special, though, you hear?)

For the love of God, shut up. 

(Who are you looking for anyways?) 

I wonder about my mind—a terrible nothingness 

that lays me bare.  

I think I lost myself a long time ago. 

I want to give life to words again. I want to churn on the insides, 

Feeling a slimy new thing growing. It will make me fat, 

And I will have to feed its suckling mouth with 

Hazelnut lattes and good sex to fuel the characters, to get 

Them going, to stretch the plot, give it deep purple marks. 

My hands will learn to nurture it. I must nurture it. 

It is counting on me. 

I am responsible for what I say 

But what if I cannot say 

anygoddamnthingatall? 

(What’s it going to be? Series of novels?) 

I should start small. 

***  

I stand against the wall across from Papa’s bed, 

And from here I see fat, quick spiders crawling across  

The window, trailing over the screen with long thin legs. 

Papa stirs, coughs, and reaches for his juice with weak hands. 

My body is heavy but I go to him, bring the cup to his lips 

And he drinks. I go to the window again, 

Remembering something I read about the spider, 

Mimetus interfector. It will climb from web to web, killing 

and eating its occupants. It will gorge and leave 

a bloodless trail. In the heat, the sturdy web will dance, 

little quakes in each fiber, vibrato of the leggy beast. 

I think of the work it does just to kill. 

I wonder about my body.  

***  

V.

VI. Language 

Where are the words? 

Sometimes I lose the ripe ones, the words that

bold and strike me. All wet and glorious in my

mouth, 

words fall and then web into patterns I don’t understand,

and then I know: 

If I sit too long feeling the numb white 

of the page pour over me, I will never write. 

I may never lick vowels into sounds and never hear the

crunch of consonants. If I don’t start saying something no

one will know I had the breath in me. 

(Where’s the death, the gory stuff…?) 

It’s there. It’s all there. 

I taste something beginning to form in my mouth, 

Feel a boy’s tongue between my teeth, taste the tang of ripened fruit

and feel the juice fill me, swallow the seeds.  

I breathe through my nose and taste bodies. 

I breathe despite the nostalgic mouthful of my past.

And I open wide and there lands a stream  

of the alcohol that killed my paternal grandfather.  

I taste what life there still has to be inside Papa, 

my mother’s father, and know what things 

will kill me if I let them.