SHOUT(30)

Tethered to her oxygen machine she ate at the kitchen table with Daddy, me, and my beloved, we drank champagne for their anniversary and ours

then helped her back into bed because Death

was gently knocking.

Getting pregnant was easy for my mom.

Staying pregnant was near impossible.

Her womb rejected boys, the doctors said, claimed her body created a hostile environment for the male fetus.

Five never-born sons Five unseen brothers

Five failure marks in Mom’s column of the marriage scorecard Six decades of my father’s disappointment On the other hand, the inside of my mother was mahogany-red

cozy for girls like me. I snuggled in, feasted, watched movies through her belly button, tasted her fear

at the five-month mark, the gallows mile marker for the boys. She’d light another cigarette slip her hand across her belly, the skin tent between us,

and whisper a prayer.

I’ve always loved my ghost brothers; they are wolves

patrolling the edge of my sleep. They keep me safe from the worst of my nightmares crushing the fear in their jaws, then going back on patrol for more. I wonder how much they know about our family about the complicated mothering of she who carried us inside her.

When I was little I had no idea what she’d been through. She used to say “Affection is a sign of weakness”

which totally baffled me because she could be both affectionate and strong. I’d give anything to understand all of the layers of tragedy that forced

her shell to become so hard.

After Mom’s last supper, that homemade mac and cheese,

relatives from beyond the grave came calling: her parents, grandparents, and Mom’s favorite dogs.

She greeted them with delight, chatted happily as she drifted to sleep.

Hallucinations, the hospice nurse said, but she wasn’t there

when the five never-borns arrived: tall and strong, salt-and-pepper hair, ice-eyed like Daddy, high cheekbones like Mom, and I knew it was time to release our mother so she could cross the river home to where the rest of the family was waiting.





tangled




I have two bookcases filled to spilling

with balls of yarn entwined with dreams and schemes for a life creative enough to knit, stitch all my prayers into sweaters and socks and hats, I have a faded plastic grocery bag brimming with my most favorite skeins,

audacious schemes.

Kin unpinned, my mother was 100 percent wool, unprocessed and itchy as hell, a hair shirt unraveled then rerolled like razor wire —carefully— into a porcupine abristle with resentment,

protecting her underbelly resisting all attempts to untangle her complications.

That’s the story I am dying to knit together,

if I could only find the pattern.





blood moon




I had my last period the month before my mother died but years later I still dream about bleeding,

the alarming crotch trickle racing to the toilet berating myself

cuz I didn’t replace the emergency tampon in my purse In the dream I pull down my pants cursing the useless, translucent toilet paper

but I stop

cuz it’s not blood, not anymore

The only thing that flows from my womb in that dream

and in this waking is thick, dark ink word-fertile and raw





ordinary damages




My father lived for five years after my mother died nobody was more surprised about this than he three days a week, I’d pick him up at dawn and we’d head to the gym, where I’d work out while he sat on the bench, coffee in hand charming the ladies

then we went to the diner for a delicious, unhealthy breakfast, I’d read the paper, he did the crossword puzzle in pen and we talked

unrolling our family legacies of trauma and silence

the stoicism that alternates with rage the kindness that hides anxiety the struggle to balance darkness with light walking in the world and hiding from it the cost of numbing pain,

the weariness of wrestling

the hungry need for forgiveness the redemption of offering it with no strings my nephew came home from Afghanistan in the middle of those years lots of soldiers from our village were returning looking much, much older than when they left I realized that their children would be crippled by the ghosts of their parents’ war like I was. I wrote The Impossible Knife of Memory with those kids in mind. I talked about the book to my father all the time. He approved, knowing full well

it was ripped from the pages of our lives.

My favorite scene in that book takes place in the graveyard where Hayley ponders the impact of the dead on the living

how the things once done shape the not yet dreamed of

she learns how to remember

without being destroyed

Before she died, my mother told me that Daddy had been institutionalized

diagnosed as manic-depressive when he was studying

to be a preacher and she worked to pay the bills.

This was right after he beat her and broke her teeth,

when the ghosts and the dust of war cycloned through him

and pushed him over the edge.

After that asylum stay

he never received counseling or medication or therapy

instead, he gutted it out on his knees in prayer and in long walks by the Erie Canal, begging for the strength to stay alive I am eternally, ridiculously grateful that he found it.