4. It’s all about the pH levels. Vinegar is an acid, pH 2.4; skin is acid, too, pH 5.5. Wet concrete is wicked alkaline, pH 12.0; that’s caustic enough to eat you alive.
5. They called us dirtbags: the clan of X-kids who smelled of cigarettes and weed and farm work and clothes worn without washing because the laundromat was expensive and the priority was staying warm. We weren’t the only ones whose parents were drunk or violent or absent . . . but we were the poor kids dealing with that shit. Our school was organized by income brackets, with the kids who skied in Colorado over winter break at the top and the dirtbags at the bottom.
6. It was probably more complicated than that, but that’s what it felt like sitting in the shadows at the base of the social mountain.
7. The concrete keeps burning even after you wash it off your skin. The gift that keeps on giving, the death that keeps on deathing.
8. Once I sat in the backseat of a Chevy with four other people; there were three more up front, plus the driver, and we were profoundly wasted and we drove around the rim of an old quarry and something happened cuz suddenly the driver took us straight back to his house and didn’t say anything for the rest of the night. Next day I went back there and found our tracks; we’d come inches from plunging to the bottom. I didn’t hang out with those guys after that.
9. Concrete burns through your skin and your meat, then it burns down to your bones if you don’t get help.
10. One night I mixed cheap whiskey with spiced Russian tea that tasted like moldy oranges. Numbing drunk was what we did in my family when horrible things happened that we didn’t talk about, like being fired, or having the electricity shut off, or Mom eating cereal for dinner so we could have the hamburger. Or being raped; we definitely didn’t talk about rape. Ever. The color I vomited for hours after those drinks was really quite astounding. I still can’t touch whiskey or spiced Russian tea.
11. I started being stupid to turn down the volume of my internal emergency alert system. But blundering stupid through life makes everything way more complicated, creates cascading avalanches of new problems.
12. I wasn’t just encased in hardening concrete up to my chin; it was pouring down my throat. I was in a race to see if I would die from the outside in or the inside out.
diagnosis
I knew that if I fell and scraped my knee
ejected headfirst through a windshield
chopped off a finger or lost a leg to a shark
I’d apply pressure to stop the bleeding
use towels, blankets, Goodwill sweaters
whatever it took to start clotting,
slow the fluid loss
I’d close my wounds with fishhooks and twine
or a stapler or a nail gun
welding torch to reconnect my spine
I’d knit skin grafts, if necessary.
After I pulled myself back together
I’d need a doctor cuz my dark corners
would be invaded
by bacteria, viruses, parasites, and more,
infectious
vectors of disease, some lethal, some merely
debilitating, chronic cripplers.
I knew that. I paid attention in health.
But I had never seen a first aid kit for the spirit
or heard the word “trauma” to describe
the way I’d hide, slide through the days unseen
or scream into the pillows
at the bottom of my closet
door closed even though no one was home.
Rape wounds deeply, splits open
your core with shrapnel.
The stench of the injury attracts maggots
which hatch into clouds of doubt and self-loathing
the dirt you feel inside you nourishes
anxiety, depression, and shame
poisoning your blood, festering
in your brain until you will do anything to stop
feeling the darkness rising within
anything
to stop feeling—
untreated pain
is a cancer of the soul
that can kill you
Salinger and me
I never thought of killing myself
not on purpose, though I was in grave danger
of a stupid accident, riding sorrow’s hamster wheel
living with a popsicle, momsicle, sisicle,
all of us frozen in confusion
me tongueless but alive
When I was little I loved Bread and Jam for Frances
the book about a fussy badger
who seemed quite sensible to me.
The author, Russell Hoban, was a fan of J. D.
Salinger—dude who wrote
The Catcher in the Rye, which is a whole
other story.
Hoban said this gobsmacking thing
about Salinger, called him “a man without eyelids”
the line always stuck with me
I was a girl without eyelids that year;
I couldn’t blink
I. saw. everything. all. the. time.
my eyes raining constantly from all the seeings,
my throat dry from lack of use
Salinger was a mess, another World War II vet
who came home with nasty memories
shoved into his head
he and my dad would have made great pals
they would have cried and fought and punched
the walls and each other when the lid came off.
We tiptoed, terrified, for years, afraid
my father would kill himself, once and for all,
but he held on, like Salinger, and showed me
that holding on was worth it.
speaking in tongues
When I was a little girl, a friend and her family
moved to the Netherlands and she had to learn
Dutch. I asked if the cows
and the chickens spoke Dutch, too.
Then my brain grew and my mouth grew hungry
for languages—I studied French and German,
tried to read a Russian dictionary.
Exchange students
roamed the halls with their mysteries,
circling in orbits
around Mr. P., my French teacher,
the only one who always smiled
at screwed-up kids like me
and looked us in the eye, like he cared
cuz he did
one afternoon Mr. P. asked me why
I hadn’t joined the International Club
he said I’d like it
(answer: because joining clubs meant being with people I didn’t know, which scared me, and I had to do that for classes, which is why I forgot to go to them a lot, but there was no way I was going to do something that stupid in my free time, no way)
I told him I was kinda busy
but I’d think about it
locker up
Sound of slamming lockers triggers
me with the spread of metal
across my tongue
as if someone pushed my face
into the steel soldiers lined against the wall,
patiently holding our books, our lunch,
decomposing bananas
and an army of fruit flies,
the combination to open sesame
always slipping past
spin the dial again until it opens, crouch
head in the dark, act
like I’m looking for something important
crowd swelling, banging riot
in the unwatched spaces
me worrying my stack of books
like I can’t
hear the conversations around me
about some girl who was crying
at the back of the bus,
potato chips and retainers and tryouts,
football players
shoving jockstraps in the faces of girls
no one will defend, essays, big tits and small
dicks,
National Honor Society infighting, drama,
so much drama
I thought I was the only person this alone,
too afraid to lift my head to check, can rats get in our lockers did I leave that book at home how much longer do I have to stay and pretend to pray to this empty altar, when will the bell release me so I can flip the page of this script to the shoulder-slumping eternal sigh of time to go to class again
This is life with your head
inside the jaws
of the beast.
scrawling yawps
when I wasn’t stoned
the only thing that helped
me breathe
was opening a book
mist enveloping, welcoming
me into the gray space
between ink black and page white
leading me along to the Shire
to start the long trek to Mordor
again
questing for unknowable treasure
the majesty of Tolkien’s adventures
cast a blood spell on me
sap rose from the ground where I was rooted,
filtered through my imagination
it dripped from my fingers as ink-blotted
poetry, scrawled escape recipes
I scribbled,
writing at the speed of life
gauntlet, thrown
My high school was designed by an incarceration
specialist to make the herding, the feeding
and the slaughter proceed as efficiently as possible
that’s what we thought,
anyway
the isolated back hallway was an icicle
laid along the school’s spine,
I avoided it, cuz it was filled with jocks
but
after detention one day, at the end of ninth grade
tired of wasting my time
going the long way around
I walked down that cold hall,
itching for a fight.
A gym teacher stepped out. The short one
the intimidating one, radiating more energy
than Jean Grey on a cranky day, she pointed
her finger at me and I snapped to attention
and when she said I was a big girl
I said “yes, ma’am”
and when she said I should go out for sports
teams in tenth grade, I said
“yes, ma’am”
because I was terrified of that woman
In the fall, I dove
into the cold, bleaching water
swim practice;
my hair clean for the first time in a year,
I lost myself in underwater meditation
of lap after lap after lap after lap
and that winter I skied
in blue jeans, not caring
that I couldn’t afford snow pants,
not giving a shit what other people thought
cuz I was fast, so strong I carved my mark
on the face of the mountain
come spring, I threw shot put and sucked
at throwing discus, but I began myself again
stopped smoking
started chipping away at my concrete cage
went to class every damn day
cuz cutting classes meant I couldn’t practice
pulled my grades out of the toilet
stopped phoning in generic answers
and sleeping through class
didn’t need to, I slept
finally
at night, too worn out to entertain
the monsters in the closet and under my bed
the nightmares receded into the River Styx
for a while
I experimented with friendships
girls I met on the team,
dusting off the concrete, my fists
uncurled a bit, I stopped
being rabbit-scared
most days
God bless that short gym teacher
for caring enough
to call me out
and hold me up
candy-striped
Mom made me get a job
the summer between
ninth and tenth grades,
between silence
and nervous laughter,
burn and infection.
Anything but babysitting, I said,
and poof, I was a candy striper, hospital
volunteer wrapped in a dress with thin stripes
white and tampon-box pink,
I arrived on time five days a week
filled water jugs, delivered flowers
counted hours, fluffed pillows
snuck cigarettes to old folks
in need of a fix. The real lessons
were found in the accidents:
taking a jug of ice
into the wrong room and finding there
a new mother, holding her baby
who’d arrived so broken inside
he couldn’t be healed,
wouldn’t live long enough to be a bored
teenager, would never blow out
a single birthday candle,
the baby’s mother—not much older than me—
she asked for Kleenex and I gave it
and she grabbed my hand
I stood next to her, our fingers entwined
my eyes on the floor
felt wrong to look at her
or the baby
so we held hands
and the ice in the pitcher melted slow
to give them more time.
Another day I took files to the morgue
because computers were still waiting
to be invented. The restless dead hungry
to come back to life, that’s what it smelled like
down there, chemicals and meat. Dead-guy hand
on the edge of a table freaked me out
so much that when one of the not-dead guys—
a junior assistant lab rat or something—
asked me for my number, I gave it to him
without thinking
then sprinted for the surface.
He called me. A movie on the first date,
garlic pizza on the second;
movies and pizza was just my speed
slow, turtle-paced, with dumb jokes
and eventually a little kissing
until in the front seat of his car
he pushed my head into his crotch
frantic-fumbling with his belt buckle;
I escaped and avoided
the morgue after that.
ignorance
We didn’t get our textbooks in health
in tenth grade until the cold stripped
the trees in late November
cuz the school board ordered the books
to be gutted, they demanded that the sex
chapters be surgically removed
so explanations of the menstrual cycle
and pics of diseased penises
wouldn’t send us into frenzied orgies
in the halls or cause us to drop out
so we could do the sex all day.
The school board barred
as much practical education
as they could. Maybe they
just really liked babies and wanted us
to start breeding as soon as possible.
chronological cartography
1. I clawed my way through ninth grade breath by breath, second by second. Kids living in war zones should get extra credit just for showing up to school. The fact that my parents didn’t see how messed up I was, and how stoned I stayed to avoid dealing with what messed me up, proved they were fighting hard battles of their own. Dad was hanging on by a thread, but Mom was a warrior. She kept us alive and made sure we had a place to live—two incredible accomplishments, when you think about it. But I didn’t think about it, not then. I focused on breathing in, breathing out, then breathing in again.
2. Sophomore year, I tried to be a student, minute by minute. Sometimes hour by hour. My X-kid friends were mad cuz I wouldn’t party with them anymore. But I made friends with a girl who swam with me and she was good at discus and I threw the shot put, which landed me with the nickname Moose. I joined the International Club and went to meetings, and Mr. P. was right—I liked it. My guidance counselor was not impressed with my progress; he shook his finger in my face and yelled at me and said if I didn’t get my act together, I’d wind up in jail.
3. By eleventh grade, living hour by hour was habit and every once in a while I could see a little further ahead. I remembered to return library books. I got a job and wasn’t fired. Some of my friends’ parents didn’t like me; they could smell the desperation, the faint whiff of disaster that clung to my clothes. Whatever. I branched into the nonfiction section of the library and read about Russian history and Japanese etiquette. I wrote down important things on a calendar. I watched the musical and went to a couple basketball games, just for fun.
cardboard boxes
I visited kin in the mountains
late in high school, pinned
down in a small town; no car, no cable TV
(internet hadn’t been invented, or gaming—hell,
they barely had lights)
our choices were simple: weed, beer, or grain
alcohol mixed
with pink Kool-Aid by spotty boys eager for sex,
sad little puppies living in crumbling houses
or decomposing trailers with pregnant girls from
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