Betty Merico After the Tornado
You thought the storm cloud was from a mine fire
sunset-painted, carrying chips of houses.
The mountains were supposed to protect you
on Pleasant Hill, Shinnston, June 23rd. Did you cry
when your grandfather showed with just his broken arm
and his broken Italian English? Were you upset
you did not join your parents in an early grave?
You were fifteen, so slim, so caught up
digging your splintered fingers through wooden planks,
once your bedroom walls. Both your neighbors’
homes were one soul emptier. Maybe God
wanted them to grieve like you. Only making it fair,
He thought.
You’ve lived in one house since,
sixty years to see it crumble.
The rotten wood reminds you of lives
lost. It sings out:
Don’t forget them, Betty.
Let the ceiling fall. Join your
father and mother and neighbors and husband,
and leave your children
and their children
to rummage the wreckage
like you did in 1944.
journaling because my therapist is on maternity leave
My best friend wants to get matching tattoos but I’m afraid two months after we do we’ll never speak again. It’ll be ugly, like throwing-glasses-at-each-other-after-signing-a-twelve-month-lease-for-a-Manhattan-shoebox-apartment-while-our-other-roommate-ducks-for-cover type of ugly. And then I’ll think about how my ex hated tattoos and I’ll cover up that fresh friendship ink with something stupid, like a piggy bank shitting money while the Charmin bear wipes its ass, or a graph with a line representing the stock market before, during, and after the 2008 recession. I wasn’t even conscious when that happened because I didn’t really become a person until I was twelve. I couldn’t even tell you what happened in movies until then. That’s when you become a person: when you comprehend, not when you feel. Anyone, conscious person or not, can feel her heart drop in her stomach when her fifth-grade best friends stop inviting her to watch movies with them and she asks why and they say well, your mommy never drives you, so we stopped asking. And it’s true, but like, it’s the thought that counts. And the lack of thought follows her until she’s twenty-one and her roommate is telling her that she’d invite her to a party but she’s just really not sure she’d be allowed to on the party’s behalf, and then the party itself rolls up to chauffeur the roommate in the dead of night in October, and when the now-conscious girl walks her roommate down to the car with just a robe between her privates and the freezing air, the party says, do you wanna come too? And the girl says no because all they’d have to do is unzip the rope and she’d be flashing everyone and she just really wants to warm up in her apartment now because she’s disturbed by the lack of thought. The lack of comprehension. Why do the things that happen before we can comprehend anything hurt us the most? Like I got really fucked up when my parents took me to get my ears pierced. I was four. Don’t worry, I begged them for it. But I cried for so long afterwards that now I just want my ears weighed taut with metal, needles pricking, scabbing, healing, all over again. I love to get my ears pierced but I couldn’t get a tattoo, I don’t think. As soon as I do, I’ll want it gone.
Nunna
A few days after the priest
anointed her and pressed
the oil into her aged palms
above the IVs and soft wrist restraints,
she woke, dentureless. I thought the last
I’d see of her deep-sunk brown eyes
was through the slits under her heavy
lids, alien in their darkness. We sawed
the bottom of her bendy straw
and put it in her coffee so she could reach
her withered lips to it and drink.
I squeezed her hand and she, light as dust,
squeezed back. She remembered
what we said while she slept.
Hank
He passed long before I was even a thought—
he was 39. My mom kept crawling
to catch his lighter from his slim fingers.
He pawned her off to Nunna. He spent
Christmas in a hospital bed stretched
out in the tiny living room, Nunna kissing
his head and holding his hand,
my aunts running through the cellar,
my mother with a pyromaniac knack
that he wouldn’t be around to see cease.
If he could meet his daughters over 60,
his wife over 90, what would he say?
What did he sound like? He drummed his rings
against the steering wheel like music.
