When I was young and despised,
my mother’s most recent blame-receptacle
target-with-two-eyes, I seem to recall
the notion of home
being as flexible and particular
as California earth, though we lived
(mostly) eastwards. A house is a house
and I settled in each and every one,
put my flimsy anchors down, roots if you would,
except we were poorly planted, maybe
the soil itself was faulty, more like the San Andreas
divide than proper earth, or maybe we were
simply determined to be housed-but-homeless
perambulators carrying our belongings
from deluxe shack to superdeluxe shack
and then spending every dollar upgrading that.
Rather than settling down or setting up shop
we were becalmed in one house and the next
and then the three or four after that
and a stint in Canadian winter and my little
sister was born up there and we came back
(the only thing I can thank those movements for
is that my little sister was born the way she is:
all that snow and Canadian north
led my mother’s womb to make a child
inverse and warm—still my sister hates cold)
where we were from, or, where we could have been
stationary, where we circumnavigated, hopping
from one to another to yet another Massachusetts
suburbia: I grew up small and hated cruel people.
I grew up male and only felt female. I grew up
smarter than most and favored because of it,
the only potential inheritor of my mother’s (tom)boyhood
and my father’s goofy charm. Wrong! I had neither.
Wronged to be treated better and then expected
to be the product of better treatment, though overall
I had it easier. And the grease of ease isn’t something
easy itself, a slimy fattening gelatin of privilege that absorbs
willpower: odd because I put in so much effort
to make everyone proud and then (later—middle school
or long after—) I started covertly doing wrong
as many things as I could. Trying to learn tolerance
and my own stupid sod. I needed people. I needed to believe
in people and the innate willingness of people to suture
themselves, one another, lost and wandering strangers.
I wanted to be a lost and wandering stranger
and then to be helped. My sister moved out
because there was college for her and she hated
my mother. She failed college and still hated
my mother. I hated college for failing her and because
she didn’t care about me either, until she moved
out and back and over. All this arbitrariness of
siblinghood and bouncing around. Couldn’t we
have grown up in one house and gotten along? Couldn’t
she not have moved out to California, just after
I cared about her? Last month or so she tried to come home,
my mother groaned and set down ground rules.
About folding sheets and pushing in couches.
I vow never to make rules about couches. Let’s
not even talk about the absences
(that was my mother’s approach, the one
that I learned so well, hating my absent cousins.
The dead aunt. The drunk grandfather. The insane
grandmother. The hole in my mother. Actually
it’s true I was a happier child not knowing
but I given the choice I would never grow up
wanting to not know. I am a curious blot,
ugly and infantile, preserving my hatred in jars.
I am a perfect refrigerator in a room
with flickering power. I recollect as a child
being obsessed with apocalypses and time travel. Perhaps
this is normal. It wasn’t the physics that got me
but the bizarre questions, the paradoxes, even
the arbitrary threats and yarn that spun off timelines
and trails of genetic harm. I’ll punch you so hard
your grandfather bowls over. Up here I’d never notice
a dumb old man flinching in Florida. More importantly,
I was always upset at the people who thought
killing your grandfather before your parents were born
triggered a time-upset. No. Time straightens out
and follows the chain of command down. My grandfather flickers
and I stop existing, fade out. But these are just theoretical concepts, really
I’m interested in killing my unborn nieces and nephews,
sparing them the microwanderlust we all come programmed with:
never really going anywhere, just fidgeting awkwardly
for miles and hours. Not light-years, none of us get astral
or older. My sister tans, I freckle, my younger sister shivers
even in summer. The little one and I walked one night
to see an artist perform—a fire-dancer, a tightrope walker.
I only let my sister have one beer. I wonder if it hurts her,
to play the role she knows I want to see, the lone survivor,
the only human to come out of this generation as a person.
Not a half-mute screw-up able only to speak too much,
in infinite malapropism. I could make pyramids out of the evils
my tongue has done, and also a dozen malnourished
Semitic women. If I were in charge of Moses he would have drowned.
Or worse. He’d float down the river only to find
the creatures living there weren’t human and didn’t drink water.
Instead they’d be pale vegans eating sand. Despite
everything the sun had done, they’d be fair-skinned, cold-blooded
reptilians, blowing away in the wind, surviving marasmus
only to become part of a desert, gnawing, edging forward.
We move so often, covering dirt. And as the radius of home
expands and gets larger the soil become infertile and full of
hurt. We find we didn’t bring water bottles. Or mirrors. We waste away
there, fighting with camels to see who can last longer.
Maybe it will rain. I will become stuck here
like relentless cement, inflexible and utterly intolerant. I
would sooner immolate than enjoy
the kinds of lethargic movement I’ve been doing. Flopping
my arms around. It takes so much more effort to stay still.
