I search my thoughts, but find they slip away.
What once was known is lost in the loudest noise.
The child in me had most answers.
The world once seemed a place I knew,
But now its lines are blurred, no separations remain.
My hands once held black and white,
But now they wobble, gone in shades of grey.
The blanks rise as clear eyes leave,
And what I thought I knew has gone astray.
Acquiesced.
Abridged.
Apathetic.
Akrasia.
Eclipsed.
Estranged.
Entitled to me.
Engulfed in your heaviness.
Untethered.
Undone.
Unannounced.
Slowly unraveling.
Lethargic.
Languid.
Loss of vision; loss of direction.
Loosened until gone.
Consumed.
Cut open.
Creature of habit.
Crowded by noises.
Pining.
Porous.
Pascal's wager.
Pouring drops of me into you.
Anchored, tethered, a relic of the past.
I seek desperately to make my final assessment
of My Inheritance.
Who will decide my self?
Me, or the lingering atavism?
The vulnerabilities of the collective lie latent within me–
They tip-toe to the surface.
Ready to ensnare: me, my children, and theirs.
I look back to my benefactors with resentment
Yet I make my own apologies in advance of my own heirs
Tortured by the power of parents.
My head overhanging the undone bed, a hushed observer
I behold the fresh force of life clasped clumsily
between the fingertips of the woman I call grandmother.
Her legacy is my inheritance, yet she fervently
mines my few years of life for a lesson to make hers.
Seated inches below my eyeline, she chews
nervously on the ends of her thick dyed hair.
My wisdom sagacious, her curiosity like a toddler
with ambitions to build the highest tower of blocks.
The insides of my grandmother's mind defrosting,
a decade of stalactites that suspended movement.
Her paralysis an act of defiance against God's thievery;
refusal to participate in a world that denied what was hers.
Once treading in scorn for those who could not perform
her most desired, magical miracle.
Longing for the dead kept her from living;
now, she survives on the miracle of her own beating heart.
A toddler excitedly wobbling as it learns to take its first few steps;
A woman nearly seventy learns life's rudimentary pieces.
She wants to flex her muscles. She yearns to love someone new.
Drops of honey emit from wrinkles collected around her eyes.
Eyes wide, anxiously awaiting my answers--
She asks me how I knew that he was the one.
It's a Sunday morning and my family is restored.
You are sitting alone at the head of the table,
You and its glass sharing a luminescence
that suffuses the fugitive morning.
Your newspaper before you, your coffee,
your huge grin. The house reverberates
in its old harmony, who’s allegiance,
we learned, was to you–not us. The same
sugary cereals, the same extra layer of fat
that you periodically determined to abandon.
More than anything–more than even you–
my family is full, vital, youthful again.
If a whole is more than the sum of its parts,
Your presence endowed the whole that refuses
quantification. Holidays that did not precipitate
Screaming between the uncles. Vacations
Complete without Bobbi’s tears; or reports of
how little she slept. She commands our audience
to her suffering. Everything is the version of
normal that we yearn for since you got sick,
but not the real one. I am once again a child
and I turn to my father, knowing there are
answers best ignored. “How did he kick open
the coffin and climb from the underground?”
He tells me it is better not to ask.
A balloon is relinquished.
Untethered, It wanders without conviction,
swallowed by the scathing sky.
Who will be its master?
Untethered, how long can I wander without conviction?
I am repulsed by my mother’s dogmas.
If you will be my master,
I promise to be a faithful prodigy.
I am consoled by my mother’s dogmas.
She learned them from her father.
Please let me be your prodigy,
I am suffocated by my own questions.
I wage war on ideas inherited from my father
by pulling the skin of my fingers.
Can I have kids if I still have questions?
I crave home whenever I cry.
A balloon is relinquished.
I did not know the rules of private.
Seated crisscross applesauce,
kids line the perimeter of the square carpet.
it nearly covers all of the cold classroom tiles.
the material prickles my legs as I sit still.
Morah Heidy wears a green button down shirt.
She is enthroned huge and heavy on her plastic chair.
She is distant from the carpet.
As she reprimands the insubordinate little boys
who cannot sit still like me,
she releases a guilty giggle.
An obedient girl, I am perfect and beloved.
Assured of my safety,
I finger my nose innocently,
relieving a deep-seated itch.
All at once I hear my name.
Banished, she orders me
to wash my hands with soap.
An unstained girl proclaimed dirty
Ears ringing, a swarm of little eyes follows me
to the bathroom, where I shoulder the lesson.
