My sister and I played catch
with a warm tomato 
from my uncle’s garden
even though my mother
kept warning us stop it.
We were in the kitchen,
my mother at the stove.
Grammy and the aunts
thought it was funny—
they’re just kids. My mother
had cut off our hair 
when it was too snarled
to brush, as we whined
and flinched, even after
she’d doused us
with No More Tears.
Grammy missed taming
our curls into braids,
blamed my mother
for not being patient,
for our crooked bangs.
My aunts let my sister strum
her plastic guitar
even though the strings
kept popping off.
My mother finally snapped
the toy guitar in half.
Mostly she was a good,
funny mom who let us
pick out crazy Easter hats
from a discount bin, 
who gave us Swedish Fish
and Burl Ives records
and taught us to read.
Of course, the tomato
splattered onto the floor.
My sister and I remember
the bloody insides and seeds
splashed on the linoleum 
but not much more.

For the daughter in me

accepting her father’s violence.



For the father in me

accepting his daughter’s silence.



For the mother in me

accepting her father’s violence.



For the daughter in me

accepting her mother’s silence.

Detailed descriptions of a father’s brutality.
Graphic images of a boy, dreaming
about food at night, his stolen
transistor radio spilling James Brown’s
good, good lovin’ over his pillow. This poem
may unfold, in detail, a husband’s violence
toward a wife. May run time in a circle.
May reveal the husband’s plush
red hands abbreviating his wife’s neck
on a crisp November afternoon, their child
watching from the porch. The husband
is my father. Is the dreaming boy. The wife 
is my mother. Sometimes, she forgets. 
Sometimes she thinks she’s ten again, 
watching her bedroom door, afraid
her father will turn the brass knob. 
That was decades ago. He must’ve stopped.
This poem may mention sexual abuse
in the abstract. This poem doesn’t know
why it must tell you. It wants you
to resist brightsiding its tragedies.
It’s tired of hearing that everything
worked out, didn’t it? Tired of hearing
the mother loved the child. So much.
Everyone says so. Everyone who knows 
that, on an April weekend, the mother
left me, the child, in her very first bedroom
whose door opened—while the child slept—
to a grandfather’s outline. Don’t think
this poem wants to stay in that bedroom.
It wants to swaddle the impossible
contours of joy. It’s tired of hearing
joy is possible. It wants joy.