We were chubby-faced school kids,
Snickers bar windpiped, crab apple pirates, backward-baseball-capped, knee-scraped snow angels, Dukes-of-Hazard dreamers, bumper-car-bodied
Salamander catchers,
Michael Jordan believers.
I couldn't fly, but my hang time was three minutes and ten seconds.
Smart kids were stupid.
Books were trees cut down.
I was a tomboy in love with Malcolm Cushion.
He had a birthmark in the shape of Canada on his left cheek.
The teachers didn't trust him.
His mother was the accidental broken tooth in a bar fight.
I had one black friend.
Her name was Erica. She had a jackknife.
She carved a gash into the center of her palm, another into mine.
We pressed our hands together and she asked if I thought
It would turn her blood white. I couldn't read her fear or hope.
I thought history was over.
I cried during the national anthem.
Once I found a butterfly's wing on the sidewalk.
I wanted to keep it but I didn't.
I knew there were things I should never find beautiful.
Like death.
And girls.
On Saturdays I walked around town
With a wheelbarrow collecting aluminum cans.
On Sundays my father paid a penny
For every cigarette butt I'd pick up in the driveway.
I was picking up cigarette butts
When Tommy Chambers punched my tooth out.
I spit on his bike seat and beat the crap out of his older brother.
I started writing songs,
Recorded them on my ghetto blaster
And mailed the tapes to the local radio station.
They never played them because they never had good taste.
My mother did.
She was a secretary.
Her fingernails were red and she loved my father,
Who after the war became a mailman
So when I was a baby she would carry me to the post office and weigh me on the postal scales.
Once, years later, I got lost in the mail.
The next day I came home from college and corrected my
Father's grammar.
When I was ten my mother had another daughter.
I had heard babies sometimes die in their sleep
So at night when my parents went to bed I'd put on my Karate Kid kimono
And I'd sneak into her room to guard her heartbeat.
The heartbeat thieves didn't find her for fifteen years.
At eleven I discovered beer.
At thirteen, shame.
At fourteen I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal lord
And savior.
At nineteen I nailed my palm to Amanda Bucker's vagina, actually drooled on her breasts,
And said yes so loud God couldn't disagree.
But my family did.
So I lost them for a while,
And in that while
My uncle Barry lost his fingers to the paper mill.
My uncle Peter lost his liver to Vietnam.
My mother lost her legs to God's will.
In her will I inherit everything:
The seventeen photographs we didn't lose in the fire.
All of them with charcoaled edges.
My mother holds them to her chest and tells me she can still smell the smoke.
I tell her I will guard them well.
My father's freckled shoulders.
My sister's brown, brown eyes.
My mother's patient hands buckling my tiny blue suspenders.
That one December when we built a bonfire in the middle of the frozen lake
And I skated around the flames
With my snowsuit's frozen zipper sticking to my tongue.
My mother called my name.
Told me to smile for the camera.
I still remember the flash.
And that enormous fire.
With the ice beneath it.
That didn't even crack.