Grandma

I hear you tell my sister her doll is ugly. It is. Cabbage Patch dolls are.

I have a garden and hedges and a hill and a sandbox and crabapples and crayons, ducks and small children around me. My mom babysits a girl named Allison I like because she is quiet and doesn’t touch my toys.

Grandma, you who teach me depression is unacceptable, crying in secret.

Solid synapses clap, the tripleting of the heartbeat tribunal, it makes my face blank the way your face is washed and drifts.


---------



I’d chosen the French horn because my cousins played it, and she'd sneered.


By then, I'd had tens of lovers. Her honesty taught me how to be cruel and loved the more for it.

This limp and hanging thing I present to you is no indication of how I was raised.