18 Years of God Damn Bullshit: A Memoir

Southbound

A familiar buzzing calls me home

It is a porch light left on still, even though I’m grown

The hum of the lake brings me a small boat

It is the song of a mourning dove, the sound of people grieving

I smell the trees from up north, the way the needles on the ground still smell like spice

Like the kitchen my mothers used to stand in

Chopping, peeling, baking, laughing

Their sounds were my sounds, a baby at their hip

I have learned to sit on counter tops long before I could speak

Stirring bubbling pots like earth-dwelling witches

Cackling in the language of women

Had they known then I wasn’t their daughter, I suspect they would’ve known it was my place still

I am a man now, no longer a child

But it is still something that sings to me in the evening

To play jacks on the floor, and listen for the scratch of a radio in the morning

Dreams were safe here

I sense they are still there

Out in the garden, painting statues

Figures out among the buoys, headed home from Louisiana

Still in that kitchen thick with steam and stories

The child waiting for its mother to come on home

They call to me, and they are waiting

I’ve been gone too long from myself again

I struggle to remember how to be small

It is small like under the kitchen table small

Little like tiny hands and tiny feet

And waiting in wardrobes behind coats and ironed shirts

A pb&j sandwich and milk left out for me

I was full and sleepy

With broad arms and warm night air

It was a village that raised me

And rocked me to sleep

The roar of cicadas would not wake me

Not crickets or raccoons 

Not crows that hollered as dawn came over the border

But the sun, so golden and freshly spun

From when life was in the stories I was told

From when I read the words slowly

Heard them in feminine baritones

The words never left my mind

This echo is familiar

I try to hold it as sand

Pouring down down down

As I forget again