Three Poems

Genealogy

My father's mother hid bottles of vodka beneath the kitchen sink
which no one discovered until we'd moved her into the Swedish

Covenant nursing home, which was dry. She quickly lost her mind.
Women in wheelchairs discussed bunions, diseases that took their eyesight,

breasts, husbands. What gods do we have left? God of garbage and tire fires,
one of them said. God of you're next. When my father visited, she'd drawn

her eyebrows with red lipstick. My mother hides chocolate in the cushions
of the couch but says she's never hungry. Her mother put her on diet pills

when she was eleven. Her mother was a small, shriveled bird. She had ten
living children and a husband who died at 52. No one taught me but my mother

and so on. The world offered so few choices. No one taught us how to be.
I rode my bike home from school past the pharmacy, the weed field, Holy Cross,

my father's truck parked at the liquor store. I was nobody, a Midwestern
girl born at the edge of the prairie. When I was twenty, I found men

liked a woman who's nobody. I married young. Divorced young. Had
a son in-between. Now I want a garden full of snakes, goldenrod gone

to seed, late apples. I want a book of women. I want a book of miracles.
None of the names we gave ourselves fit. I did not understand the wonders
                         a person could be.

 

An Invention

When I was a girl
     I thought I'd write a poem
          to catch God. I thought
               I could come across Them in a clearing
          like a startled deer.
     I was young and full of feelings then.

And God was—maybe judgement, maybe
     transcendence, maybe
          someone
               standing
          in the doorway with a fistful
     of queen Anne's lace.

I knew what I'd already failed
     to achieve: beauty, thinness, a clear
          mind.
               But God kept Themselves
          holed up in holy, golden buildings
     the places I could not go.

Then I thought marriage was the answer.
     I could be a woman that a man, any man,
          would want, and that
               was also like knowing God.
          Fist after fist through drywall.
     Against my throat.

By the time my baby
     was born I knew God was a man
          with a gun behind the woodshed.
               It wasn't until that first night alone
          after the divorce,
     collapsed on the apartment floor

that I decided to invent
     a God who could love
          even me.

 

Two Truths and a Lie

When I was fourteen at a Confirmation retreat run by the Society
of the Divine Word, I lit the altar cloth on fire on purpose.

I told my friends in elementary school I was a champion figure
skater but my mom hid my awards so they wouldn't be jealous.

I told my cousins that I had a secret door in my closet to the Sara
Lee factory which was on the edge of town because I was in fact

Sara Lee. I poured Pepsi and Cheerios in the toilet and told my mother
I was sick so I could stay home and have the house to myself. I told

my professor my grandmother died so I could miss the test and then
my grandmother actually died. I told my ex-husband I loved him. I told

myself that I believed it. I told my sister K— if she told mom I hit her
with a Barbie doll and didn't clean up the blood on the new carpet

she would get in trouble. I told my therapist I didn't think about
killing myself. I stole Mentos from the pharmacy and filled

my English teacher's dented white Honda with them, left a red
lipstick kiss on the hood. I told my sister B— I wasn't a virgin.

When I was seven I repeated I hate you god I hate you god.
I don't know why I hated god but I knew I'd be forgiven.