Other places we learned religion

OTHER PLACES WE LEARNED RELIGION

The color blue

LinkedIn suggests that Criminal Cousin One is a kitchen designer, skilled in Customer Service, Flooring, & Bath Design. Graduated from Anthracite High School (after juvenile detention). One time

Cousin Two colored his entire body blue with Crayolas, but Uncle will still only talk about the tiny blue toddler penis. I imagine Uncle dreams in bruise now. Cousin Two too: navy and inflammatory

nightshade. Uncle ran the robot that does surgery on open hearts until he worked at Home Depot, wearing that Halloween-orange smock (boo). He was not at fault, but. Mother-Father God:

 

Halloween

When I was a Still Life, I wore a parka under the masonite table on my shoulders for trick- or-treat. Plastic flowerpot with the bottom cut off, rim resting just under my eyes. Silk

flowers framing face, tablecloth made of purple quilt. Ruby shoes. October is snow here,and ghosts. Aunt brings out paintbrushes and tiny jars of glaze to spread broken glass

on ornaments for the trees we’ll cut down in December. We sit around the table brushing Fragile with liquid that’ll explode. Mom asks my Enneagram type: needs it for therapy;

she’s practicing letting me “Moses in the Reeds.” My two fat baby arms reach out of the basket, shove Mom who has Criminal Cousin One’s face. Shove the rest of them too. Push-push away from shore.

 

Horse’s Ass

Mom loves MANIFESTATION and insists that whatever I say or think will come true unless I take it out of the law. Grandpa tells Family History that starts: Once Upon a Time, in Another

Time, in The Other Time, and ends: I’m half child of God and half horse’s ass, kid. My baby basket-body, paddle arms reaching for the water they can’t reach, screaming I take it out of the law, screaming

I take it out of the law! I take it out of the law! Grandpa says I’m lucky: 1800s mothers lined up at the port of the Seine, holding infants—the mildest of eggs—to stick them in bassinets on the barge.

Off to milk for a year or two; then they’d come back squawking like hell, initials embroidered in their hems for recognition. Boat anchor dropped in the same old slip like it never happened.

 

York Street basement

Uncle got religion from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings with Grandma and Grandpa when he was thirteen. Uncle has never had anything to drink but Diet Mountain Dew (or iced tea

if it’s up to Mom), and by “got” I mean: Uncle brought a dog clicker to Grandpa’s funeral, for his imaginary slide show. Click. Here you see a young Frank Charles, six foot eight and getting the sheep ready to go over

the Western Slope into Utah. Click. Here’s Frank with a polished silver belt buckle and a flask of whiskeyin his boot. Click. Here he’s betting the whole damn ranch in a poker game. Click. Here he’s losing it. Click—

 here’s the motherfucker cornering his son. Click. Here he’s pointing to his 7-year-old daughter asking “who’s that?” Click. Here’s the cocksucker holding a butcher knife to our ears when we don’t listen. Click. Here.

 

Our Father Lutheran on Holly St.

Respectfully, we’re never allowed in the Church again. In nursing school, Uncle froze the cat when she died; brought her out for dissection on the kitchen table after the turkey and cranberries.

Dear Father, who art in Heaven. I was a kid in the York Street basement, just like Uncle. We know how to introduce ourselves now. God remove my defects of character. Now Uncle makes wooden blocks

by hand for Cousin Two’s baby. Now he makes me a sewing box with a wooden shelf like inverse-camel bump bump bump for my spools of thread. (He was a very good nurse; it was the robot who failed him.)

 

The rules are:

You Can Only Use the Materials Given to You. 4 plastic straws, 3 feet of double stick scotch tape, one raw egg, 16 toothpicks, 1 half page of funnies from the Sunday paper,

a 1x2” piece of cardboard, scissors. Cross your fingers; you have 15 minutes to build a cell for the egg. First Prize goes to the team whose yolk doesn’t break when dropped

from 10 feet. Second Prize goes to the team with the most artistic design. Mom says we try and try when I’m little. I don’t remember because I’m still too runny.

 

The voice in Mom’s iPhone

Science of Mind, Unity, and Christian Science are sisters or that’s what Mom says when she has Siri text me: The law is the immutable God stuff. The potting soil. It has no opinion what you create with your mind.

 You can create glory or your own personal hell. When you say something that’d be damaging if it were to Manifest,  you call yourself on it. You are connected to God. You say I take it out of the law. You cannot take it back. You become

more responsible. I take it out of the law means Oopsie I didn’t mean that. OOPSIE, I think. OOPSIE oopsie oopsie oopsie oopsie when the egg breaks for the 17th time and I almost-but-do-not cry.

 

Cone 6 porcelain

When I’m grown, Aunt lets me load her kiln in the mornings before she goes to work at the hospital. The television is loud and irrelevant. I place glazed vulvas in the depths

of bowls so the pieces will melt together at 2000 degrees. For October, Uncle uses his jigsaw to cut life size cats and witches from ½ inch A/C ply—like the wooden cutout people at the fair—for our yard.

Pumpkin on pumpkin on pumpkin (snowman configuration) with pointed hats or ears and tails. Mom gets fistfuls of paintbrushes and acrylics from the basement. We cold sweat over cups of cider

and tarps while we paint. There are no holes for our faces; I give my pumpkin person triangle features too small for his head. I ask Mom to take the Forgiveness Languages Quiz on the 5 Love Languages

website. Turns out Mom learned anger from the back seat at AA meetings on York Street too. I learned the word insolent from Mom. Depending on the time of day, my names are Angel Butt and Insolent Little Shit.

 

11 o’clock, Sundays

What I learned is the coffee tastes the same (bad) at AA meetings and at INSTITUTE FOR SELF-ACTUALIZATION meetings and at Course in Miracles meetings and at the Religious Science

church that is 45 Mommy-minutes away (at least 79 real kid-minutes away) and probably at Al-Anon too, where we Do Not Go because my God, those pansies and no one here values real cream. Grandpa is In Charge

and his meeting is called FRANK’S MEETING or “The Hideous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” which is confusing when there are a lot more than four people here. Ezekiel says the Four Horsemen

are sword, famine, wild beasts, and plague, but Grandpa is most Wild Beast because he can be furry sometimes (like when he makes sourdough pancakes or reads from the red Rumi or says “Knock ‘em in the crick, kid”

and probably means: literally, push those other kids in the mud). I tell those kids Mom is a Mystic because that’s the approved word, and one says we’re witches and going to hell but he’s only wrong about half.

 

Wet flour and newspaper

Halloween starts on the fall equinox. That’s when Uncle started making Mom the pumpkin costume. Chicken wire and layers of papier-mache for her 3rd grade body. When she didn’t fit through the door

at elementary school, her teacher shoved her and shoved her until the gourd cracked and she sobbed at school but not at home. We don’t sob at home. Grandpa hollers Wipe that look off your face or I’ll smack

it off and his hands are still baseball mits even when he’s 74. We add indigo paint into the black of the witches’ hats to create believable shadows.

 

Six of one, half dozen of the other

The month Uncle teaches me to weld in the garage studio, he boils water for a morning and an afternoon cup of Constant Comment tea for me every day. The orange rind cuts

the tannins before I go back to spark, hair balled up under the fire-engine-red cap with the tiny bill that he let me choose for myself at the metalworkers’ shop

on Santa Fe. We slice tubes of metal like nothing and Mr. Potato Head them back together into bookshelves for my hundreds and hundreds of books.

 

Puking dogs

When I visit Mom in December, we make German chocolate cake in the kitchen where I met Criminal Cousin One only one time, after Grandpa’s funeral. Mom’s twin(-ish). She separates egg

after egg and puts pristine half circles of yellow-orange in the fridge until Uncle and Aunt and Cousin Two arrive for the family Gingerbread House Contest and we make the coconut frosting. Uncle

brings his drill and his saw, like always, and I scream: You Can Only Use the Materials Given to You! Every year is bigger than the last, so he plucks a Goodwill Barbie from his bag. My Necco shingles

are sliding from powdered sugar cement while he severs her legs to stick upside down in the chimney, pink high heels flying. He will accept Second Prize.

 

Shit or get off the pot

He didn’t get sober all at once. He stopped drinking but his brain was still wet. Mom doesn’t notice the Gospel of Grandpa might be important to me until I ask. Woo Woo is wet too, Mommy. She sends Stuart Wilde from FedEx: THE UNIVERSAL

LAW HAS NO WAY OF KNOWING WHAT YOU WANT. THE UNIVERSAL LAW DOES NOT DISCRIMINATE BETWEEN YOUR LIKES AND DISLIKES. THE UNIVERSAL LAW REACTS ANOMALOUSLY TO

UNCERTAIN MESSAGES. In the truck with Uncle, I ask for stories stories stories. Mostly he just says: Shut up, Maisie, when the mutt starts yipping her needs. We bungee the wood planks in the bed; one’s split because the cost of lumber

is up since the summer Uncle made his boat to paddle out from here. Grandpa told stories; maybe that’s why Uncle doesn’t. Once Upon a Time, in Another Time, in The Other Time, there was a Bluuuuuuue Lady. And the Blue Lady sat

in a tiny blue toll booth, in the middle of a desert, in Another desert, in The Other desert. The only rule I learn is something about scale. When the story fails, just make it bigger.

 

Going to get the paper

I step on a sidewalk crack and take it out of the law. Turn around walk back step again left right hop on the left sorrysorrysorrysorry go back try again hop on the right this time, Even, Good, wipe that look off your face left

right right oopsie OOPSIE CONFINES ARE BOUNDARIES OR ILLUSIONS go back start again too much weight on the left pinky toe, balance the right, hands swing the same on both sides, brush right hip pointer finger go back

start again left pointer finger catch hangnail go back try to catch right hangnail no hangnail here saw left hip inexplicable smooth nail saw saw saw no-bite sorry sorry oopsie I take it out of the Law + start again.

 

Seven Hail Marys, plus some

Hail Marianne Williamson (for President! says Mom) hail Ernest Holmes hail Jack Kornfield and his Lovingkindness hail Dr. Wayne Dyer. Hail Karen Goldman’s Advanced Handbook for Aspiring Angels,

hail the Angels on the nursery walls Mom painted with Grandma hail the color Kelly Green they sponged on the bottom half below the molding. Hail page 160 where Mom wrote her dedication next to the WISDOM

OF INSECURITY hail Darshan with the Master in hotel conference rooms in San Diego and Albuquerque, New Mexico, hail the Harry Potters on tape I got in the Saturn on the freeway there and the room service

chocolate sundaes I got in the queen bed we shared, just me and Mom. Hail the green chiles on our eggs and the wooden chairs painted turquoise, just off the square, just before heading back.

 

The art of costuming

My friends and I were not the leads in the school play because Someone Else was the lead in the school play. In response, Mom made crap spaghetti from the jar and bowls of peas, cream

pies from Jell-O she’d never buy otherwise and crust from the freezer aisle. Three shower caps with frogs from the party store, yellow rain slickers and bejeweled protective eyewear, and set us to food fight in the dining

room, tarps on the walls and ceiling. We screamed our needs: Now YOU be Someone Else! Now YOU be Someone Else! One whole chunk of lemon pie like a finger, stuck picking my nose.

 

Spaghetti sauce and strawberry laughing gas

I know the word vagina before anyone else because I’ll never be able to have children / I take it out of the law! I take it out of the law. (Don’t ask Mom if the double negative cancels itself out because she is a fish and teaches recipes by GLUG GLUG of olive oil and

SHPATSH of cumin seeds and a WEEWAW of butter, so she doesn’t know the words “three quarters of a cup” or “one tablespoon” and will only wave her arms like they’re a kite that’s too heavy and squish her nose like a pig at me if I ask questions like about double

negatives or about the rules. The night before I have surgery to get my insides rearranged, Mom invites all of my 2nd grade class and our teacher to make meatballs in the kitchen. Mom buys the new Costco out of step stools so we can reach the tile countertops.

Meatballs might balm the revelation of my seven-year-old infertility, and squeals and ground beef on the ceiling make the teacher clutch her silver Star of David while she leans against the door to the basement. In a few years we’ll erect temporary walls into a maze

down there and invite the whole 4th grade to our haunted house for Halloween. Mom’s friends will be ghouls in the corners; cauldrons of thick noodles slathered in meat sauce, melted marshmallow cream organs with chunked chocolate and graham crackers for bone shards.

 

Because Martha Stewart said so

On a good day, Mom painted the dining room as fuchsia as the one in the Crayola box and started crying before she even got the lime green accents from TJ Maxx arranged on the table.

I kicked her out and got a ride to Home Depot with the man of the moment for a nice plain baby blue and as many buckets of Kilz would fit in his Honda. It took just that many buckets, plus

some dalliance with the ceiling to ditch the pink bleeding through, and Mom cried harder when the dining room didn’t hurt so bad and the tarps were gone and the flowers in the vase beckoned her to calm.

 

“I used to dance around the living room” -Maggie, A Chorus Line

“Most of what happened, happened in my imagination.” That’s what Mom says about her theater career. No music allowed in Grandpa’s house, but Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair at the modern dance classes Mom paid for out of

flower shop money she made when she was twelve. You don’t have to be a star to twirl, Mommy (still, Uncle calls her Gracie because of how often she trips on her Basset Hound Body). Mom rode a yellow Schwinn away from

hollering to Dancewear Showcase for jazz shoes and took three buses to Bonfils Theater for improv on the weekends. The Law is: if you make it to Broadway, you can be Somebody. The Law is: SHE SELLS SEASHELLS BY THE SEA

SHORE. / RED LEATHER, YELLOW LEATHER. / The Law is: Mom taking Grandma to RENT and explaining AIDS in a red velvet seat. The Law is: Shakespeare Club and Transcendental Meditation to get through high school. The Law:

 

Jesus Fucking Christ

I learned to cross myself like: Spectacles, Testicles, Wallet, and Comb: up-down-left-right, but definitely no one in this family has ever used tiny plastic teeth to ready ourselves for the world. We are eleven dogs at our most.

Lexi and Layla, Watson and Christmas and Cassie and Midnight, Myles and Gilbert, Buddy and Fred and the Pyrenees: Fizz (in the soda pop). They all come hollering to the screen door to lay down what’s what: noise and piling paws

on top of each other, wiry cattle dog hair and long black retriever softs teething on the colorful patterned tights Mom scrunches up to slip my legs into. ALRIGHT ALRIGHT SHUT THE HELL UP JESUS. Once

Mom sets me on a bathroom counter candle to wash her hands and my tulle skirt goes up in flames. Oopsie. Fuck. Christmas Baptism in Uncle’s kitchen sink and backless butt in Hanes, wrinkled under elastic tights, intact.

 

PAAS Easter egg dye

Cousin Two and his baby are on FaceTime. Baby holds his lobes and sobs at my face; ears infected like mine always were. Maybe we’re bad parents but Cousin Two is shrugging like it’s nothing but

he looks like a beet with a beard. Maybe the infection went on too long, but babies don’t cry in this family, so how were they supposed to know. The chickens in the yard behind are Winona Ryder, Goldie Hen

and Rooster. Rooster is a girl is what Cousin Two says. We thought she might be a boy, didn’t lay,  real rowdy, always escaping. Then one day we got a blue egg. This is what girlhood means here, but still

she’s not productive enough. She’ll be first on the chopping block next spring. Lazy ass bird. He sends pictures of the eggs they dyed with the baby, side by side with the bleached ones Uncle and Aunt dyed from the store.

The colors are so bright when the little egg maybe-babies came from the hay instead of industrial fridge. I chicken-sat once; the girls didn’t lay while I was there. Take some of your eggs to Mom, is what I say. She’d like that.

 

 “Men leave and men die”

The boyfriends/fiancées/husbands were never my daddies. One potato two potato three potato four. Grandma told Mom to “get her own” shit (money) because the boys just bark and bark and then they’re gone. Cousin Two

sent Midnight out to the farm for being a lazy shit and gnawing through the fence again. Dickhead mutt with an attitude problem. Mean dogs bite, but that’s not why Buddy bit Cousin Two in the balls. Skipping double Dutch, the rules are: Cinderella /

dressed in yella / went upstairs to / kiss her fella / made a mistake and kissed a snake / how many doctors did it take? /  Out with the old, in with the: 1, 2, 3, 4. Babymaker, babymaker. Five potato six potato seven potato more.

 

Miracle Gro

The first place I go as a baby is Nick’s Garden Center, with Mom and Grandma in her lime green denim from The Gap. Nick and his nephews and sons are always saying hola hola to Mom over the years—big, sweet smile

wrinklies I want to tuck myself into and go to sleep—and the ladies sell the best bean burritos out of a rolling cart, coconut popsicles with flecks of real coconut, strawberry for Mom. GOD BLESS PANSIES, she says, GOD

BLESS PANSIES. First words: Japanese Irises! Daffy Ducks for daffodils, Impatients instead of impatiens, but she never told me that wasn’t the way; hatch chiles, anchos. Poblano, Anaheim, serrano. Hail the West,

God bless the West, to the click of Grandma’s four-inch wedge sandals and the piled up pallet of garden soil thunked into the trunk every summer, and flats of suede pansies, every single color you’ve ever heard of.

 

You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.

When you’re manifesting miracles, the most important thing is to keep your vision between you and God. A miracle is like a dog with his tail on fire: let him go and he’ll bolt. The world can make

your miracle ugly; that’s what Mom tells me when we’re lighting the red votives that mean LOVE and the purple votives that mean ABUNDANCE. We’re supposed to stay up till midnight meditating

but Mom sets the oven and microwave clocks back three hours. I’m too marble-hard for this kind of lie, so I cry myself to sleep every New Year’s Eve. Blessing of the Newborn: DEAR GOD, (Marianne Williamson)

MAY THE SPIRIT OF THIS FAMILY, GENERATIONS PAST AND FUTURE, BURST FORTH TO BLESS AND SUSTAIN THIS CHILD. Sometimes I think I’m Mom’s ugly miracle. The meanest thing

I can think to say to the both of us. We realize that the world is not now what it should be, that it does not vibrate  with the name of the Father, with the love and light that He intends. It’s tail in the water or immolation.

 

Olivia Benson

We only got a TV because stepdad-number-whatever needed to watch the Golf Channel for three to seven hours right before any time Mom was having people over and oiling the floors with Murphy’s

Wood Soap and lemons. After it arrived, every other night it was screaming or: Narrator: In the criminal justice system,  sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous. In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate

these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit. These are their stories. I tell Mom if I ever get confirmed (I won’t, but I do go to Catholic school), Liv will be my patron saint.

 

J.A. Henckels French knife

My parents are a product of Shamrock, U.S. Foods, Sysco, Performance Foods, Roma, Alliant. Chicken breasts by the case; the garage with its own freezer for the racks of ribs and industrial blocks of cheese. The kid 

is gonna know how to hold a knife, so I’m four or five and the special gift is a black handle with the perfect silver blade as long as my-wrist-to-my-elbow or maybe longer. I cut onion after onion with a piece of Orowheat wheat

soggy and hanging from my baby mouth to catch the crying juice before it gets me in the eyes. In a few years, we’ll plant a catalpa tree out front and Mom’s man will tangle himself in black

duct tape trying to put it back together when the snow comes too early and hacks its arms to hell. Grandma died one October when her cottonwood dropped its own flake-laden arm on her head. Cold is so much

to carry, so I wield Grandma’s bubblegum pink spandex into cosmo petal summer for the eulogy. Every year, Mom’s man says the catalpa is dead and Mom says it’s dead, but I say: she’s not a gravestone! She just needs extra

incubation. In September, she blooms in time to bye-bye all the bird mommies who whispered my well-wishes to her through the hot months. Bye-bye, bye-bye, they always echo back, just like that, just before flying away from here.

 

Keeping count

When I have the dreams about the house fire finding and blackening my body, I’m supposed to imagine a pink cloud of light and my bed is The Master’s hands holding me. I’m not so big, but the man

has giant hands. We learned the hard way to blow the insides out of the eggs with a straw before dyeing and hiding them between the worn-down bricks of the fireplace or in the mantle wreath, but learning is not

all it takes in this house. All it takes is the gallons of Nature’s Miracle in the laundry room, plus some. Mom does her shrug every year when I try to say the Lessons We Know to Be True while she throws the eggs

into their big giant hard-boil hot tub on the stove. I think maybe she breaks some on purpose so she can pickle them in beet juice and eat them pink for a snack. The others rot again in places we forget.

 

The Proper Pig

Mom carries me out of Piccolo’s Italian Mexican fusion by my feet when I forget to say thank you for the Shirley Temple. I’m screaming Maraschino odes all the way to the parking lot, but I’m not allowed

to go to a restaurant again until I read Miss Manners and pass my table test. Too bad I was built for the sit-ins I launch against soggy shredded cabbage. The pig statue works like this: you break a rule of etiquette, he sits

in front of your plate to shame you. I love to send the pig to Mom’s man of the house for his big ugly mouth chewing—dentures riding cud—and elbows on the table. Once he was a grown-up, Cousin Two candy-striped

his man-tummy with face paints for Christmas in July. The cousins get a sort of cheesy-meets-atheism that I was never allowed, across town. Uncle makes Reindeer Puke, just like December: cream cheese, sour cream, spinach,

and artichoke hearts for the chunked up French bread. Everyone licks the white from their fingers. For the white elephant, we bring The Proper Pig, polka-dotted in orange and green. At home, we have a bland pink-grey spare.

 

Do it yourself green apple wax

Uncle lets his hair grow past his shoulders and then cuts off the curls, trying to toss off unruly. Too bad it bounces right back, same as the rest of us. Mom gets this white plastic container, metal center, and tiny-Crockpots her bikini

wax in the bathroom we share. The cord is kinky like everything electrical she owns, tossed in the cupboard—same as salt over the left shoulder. Towels and plastic-wrapped tampons blotted in sticky green; drips

on the counter metastasizing dog and dark Mom hairs to baby yellow. The rules are: GooGone in jumbo size / please GOD Mom, switch to Nair; finally, fry my nose hairs to crisps, but rinse it clean. Write: Never mix

Scrubbing Bubbles and Comet over and over on the chalkboard wall in the basement. Unless you want to die today. Great Grandma tried to kill Great Aunt by gassing the house from the oven once. Catholic on Protestant Holy Hells.

 

Six-disc CD changer

Gus the big dog with the bad hair day and fat head is ministering to Mom (she doesn’t say about what). Bright orange Savage Garden, Beth Nielsen Chapman, Carole King, Tracy Chapman, the grandma on the Pippin soundtrack

who spits out her teeth with every bite of succulent pear and sings in the old lady voice I crackle scream from the wooden coffee tabletop. Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, Mamma Mia, Proud Mary who keeps on burnin’

and we and Tina Turner take the beginning of the song easy and we and Tina Turner do the finish rough, and James Taylor, and “Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats.” The heel-toe, toe-heel, like our bare soles are tap shoes,

Mom’s big feet so much more thunderous: roaring applause egging on the both of us. Every year she took kitchen shears to the roses that grew up around the mailbox, too prissy, down to the root to recharge for their murder the next year.

 

“It only hurts when you get to the end of the chain”

Hot glue gun scars or bust. Steam scars from scooping wriggly whites and runny yolks of eggs ‘n’ dunkies onto their torn little bread-part beds, plus butter. I have Daddy’s paperwhite narcissus

hands coming up from river rocks, no soil, and their graceful fish-stink. Cousin Two says I should toughen up, Kid; I’ve got wimp like stink on shit and we all know it, but I like my petals too much

to bruise them. Glass of milk at Daddy’s for the pounds and pounds of green chiles at Mom’s, roasted in a metal cage and sweating right back into the flames that blister them.

 

Doctor’s note

Mom invented the Call for Love Day; it’s not Daddy’s birdbone structure that made me baby. Course in Miracles says: at all times you’re either calling for love or extending it. Being sick is just calling for love. Mom invented

the Day so we wouldn’t have to get sick anymore; we could just Call for Love and get our needs met. No more undercooked whites if we just get the heat when we’re raw. One quick IV vitamin C on the coral floral

couch; mural of flowering bushes, blue-green vines and faux brick coming through faux plaster; doctor who lost his license in the U.S. of A. SOULS ARE BOUND TO THE GREAT WHEEL OF BIRTH AND DEATH;

THE WHEEL OF EIGHTY-FOUR. The Master says: The inside is outside. The family room says: The inside is outside. The Master says: If we put forth a negative cause, a negative effect will follow. Mom says: The law is the immutable God

 stuff. Simon says: The potting soil has no opinion what you create with your mind. Simon says: No more vaccines. Simon says: No more hurting. Simon says: It would take a soul eighty-four million years to get a human body again. Get a human body again!

 

(Simon didn’t say.)

The nutcrackers line up on Uncle and Aunt’s mantle 365 days of the year, but they must get tired and lie down at night. Tombé pas de bourrée, pas de bourrée, pas de chat, glissade, glissade, to the bar. Chin UP, plie first, tendu front, tendu

side, tendu back, AND second. Plie AND tendu front tendu side tendu back AND first. The shooting range Grandpa built on the desert near Walsenburg might’ve been good for spotting practice, but they never took me along: pretty in lost girl

pirouette. Cousin Three is a girl too; did I say that? Blonde curls just like me, but she has dimples to bury dirt in and thicker bones and has never been plagued by pointe shoes. (I know I didn’t say that.) She’s what I’d be if my personality ever just took

its God Damned vitamins before the growth plates closed. The hollering cheer goes: ONE: WE ARE FRITZ STAHLBAUM; TWO: A LITTLE BIT LOUDER; THREE: I STILL CAN’T HEAR YOU; FOUR: MORE MORE MORE. ONE—

 

Fireworks spiffed up with gunpowder

Hand-crank ice cream makers for Fourth of July. Bed of bunnies in a drunk’s truck for Easter, clobbering each other in soft bunny feet. Every truck is a truck full of rifles and a truck full of luck. Mom says: I’M NOT ENOUGH sits

on the lap of Santa, wraps him in a feather boa, and thinks: with enough glitter, Santa will never know… Also, Oprah. Mom says OPRAH. A party in this house is The Whole OPRAH. January Firsts are for black-eyed peas and visions.

The witch lit the Bayberry Candle / Burned to the Socket / Brings Luck to the House / and Gold to the Pocket (before she burned her house down with a cauldron and black magic gone wrong). Mom made some boundaries. Black

Magic is Strictly Discouraged in this family, but Grandma’s pink and purple Girls Guide to Spells clutches a little bit of naughty, so I hide it, sometimes, with the rock collection in the black velvet pouch so I can send my curses in private.

 

Famous last words

Mom and Grandma had a fight before the cottonwood tree killed Grandma. Rage: she drove over to return Mom’s serving dishes (minus black beans with half a bottle of cumin, carrots; yogurt and cilantro to throw on top; gumbo

with shrimp and crab and andouille; minus mango salsa, red onions & jalapeños; minus white chile with white pepper and green chiles gutted under hot water to thaw them out). Empty plastic Tupperwares tossed out a hatch-

back window and battering the grass, empty. Leather boots and wedge clogs worn for walking two Airedale terriers and two bitchy dalmatians were built for kicking up shit. Then: DENVER POST REPORTER KILLED BY FALLING

TREE LIMB, but she was first on the scene at Columbine and she wrote it all down. She wrote a decade of every death penalty appeal in a Denver court because Forgiveness. Grandma didn’t reign over her own drunks for nothing:

GINNY’S MEETING was Sundays at 11, same as Grandpa’s. God forgive me where I have been resentful, selfish, dishonest  or afraid. Help me to not keep anything to myself but to discuss it all openly—show me where I owe an apology and help me

make it. Use me in the mainstream of life, God. THE UNIVERSE REACTS DRASTICALLY. Grandma was a bird with concrete bones made of cement and blood instead of cement and water. Somehow, she could fly anyway.

 

I’m Not Really a Waitress

It was the real name of the holly and blood red OPI nail color with a sheen that Mom bought by the case when it was discontinued. She always called it I’m Not Just a Waitress, which feels like an Important Mistake.

Grandma said it was blue and green nails that could cure anything. A Tupperware of forest and seafoam, big green glitter flakes and Caribbean blue. Lime and navy and baby. Crusted-shut cobalt and crackled white plastic brush

to kelly, all for me. Mom says my nails look diseased. Cousin Two and Cousin Three say Spoiled Rotten Spoiled Rotten, but Mom just says Rotten and also that pink will take the mold tint out of my keratin if I can get my act together and use it.

 

One thick bar of soap

Mom’s face was green at her first Halloween with First Husband. Or not her face, but. She built the witch face from thin soap she layered on top of itself for hours, hardened and carved into giant hooknose and protruding

forehead. It was the soap she painted green. Ugly effort all for him. Get that tone out your mouth or I’ll scrub it out; that’s how I knew soap, but I wasn’t even a maybe baby yet when Mom was witching after First Husband.

All the other ladies showed up dressed as Pretty, and she cried soap into her eyes I bet because we don’t learn that country club kind of ladylike in this family. Mom gave me her burnt-out black velvet shawl and red velvet

skirt to the floor; Mom gave me a mole so big on grade four Halloween I could see it in my periphery; my own haunting. Such a production and we still show up to private school and the private party ugly.

 

“Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love”

Before there was the castle called Wizard’s Chest with the drawbridge and the dragon in Cherry Creek, there was a 1930s drugstore on University with a creaky staircase up to the latex and oil-base for making magic happen. Adolesce, /

Adolesce! / Too young to take over / Too old to ignore / Gee I’m almost ready / But / What / For? Mom learned to make magic out of: broken tailbone, getting mugged, and Grandma telling her she better go get a job before hanging up the phone.

There’s a lot / I am not / Certain of… Mom tells me her best friend Sally at the Merle Norman cosmetics counter did the “Tits and Ass” song on Broadway. When we say our prayers, we say: Thank you CHORUS LINEs of the Past,

Thank you BEND and SNAPs of the now. I picture Sally like Paulette the nail lady from Legally Blonde and Mom’s Elle and I’m Elle maybe too. I like nature so Mom gives me a tent and we have Camp Legally Pink for my thirteenth birthday.

The craft is gluing silk flowers from Hobby Lobby onto pink baseball caps and the mess is spilled mugs of chai and guacamole inside the tent flaps. WHEN AM I GONNA GET TITS? Hello twelve, Hello thirteen, Hello love.

 

Johnny Cash

At the King Soopers I thought I might grow up to be a cowgirl if I just rode the penny horse machine at the checkout the right number of times, but I’m still just the family baby who got anaphylaxis at the farm

in La Veta. Grandpa tells me to Ante up, kid when I’m being slow because the cards are too big for my little hands, and Shit or get off the pot, which is extra funny later because of the pot of chips but isn’t funny now because

Grandpa is OUR FATHER, WHO ART IN HEAVEN, HALLOWED BE THY NAME or something like that and six foot eight. Even though he lost every last sheep in Texas Hold‘em, it was still the only time he ever lost.

 

Blood and guts

Grandpa’s dad died on the sagebrush and yellow desert taking the sheep west for winter. The story goes that Grandpa put Grandpa Sr. on the back of a horse and carried him back over the Western Slope to Gunnison, but that’s not

what happened. There was a truck, even though nothing is ever machine. We’re machine enough. On the wolf reserve, my job was to scrub out the beds of old pickups used to scoop roadkill for the beautiful

beasts. Summer sweating and the beds were always covered in a camper shell to keep carrion birds at bay. Oozing blood, dried flesh, and soap suds. Grandpa Sr. was one Sonofabitch says Grandpa, so then I guess that’s what trickled down

to the rest of us. Sand and salt and everything we do to scrub ourselves of the rotting chunks of whichever man came before. When Uncle and Aunt and Cousin and Cousin left the state to be with their other family, and Grandma

and Grandpa were dead, Mom spray painted six- and eight-foot branches gold to make an indoor forest for Thanksgiving. I made a rough golden broom for Christmas, tied with the string that held the turkey’s legs shut. Swept out the old.

 

A freckle past a hair

Cousin Two has two babies now and Cousin Three has stopped bringing Nalgenes full of Red Bull vodkas to family gatherings. Uncle and Aunt are still on time with vodka-crust pies and Mom still doesn’t have a wristwatch and still makes jokes about telling

time from the moles on her wrists. The older drunk that Mom dated at my age was a friend of Grandpa, and the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse didn’t like her fucking with AA sanctity and the King. The Master says: TIME FACILITATES THE ILLUSION OF

REALITY, CREATING SEPARATION BETWEEN THE SOUL AND THE DIVINE. Mom liked her older sober drunk because he was good in bed and his psychic powers brought Marianne Williamson to the house for a reading. Time: just a scar till a freckle.

Marianne page 43: What she wanted in a protector was not to be found in Daddy. Two hairs past a mole. Marianne page 60:  Embrace the Goddess! / My boyfriend left me for a bimbo. Marianne 73: We must relinquish the paradigm of men as power. Always, always changing.

 

The nickname Angel Butt

Pile of Mom dreams: A laughing girl with blonde curls running around in a field of flowers, nightly. On the night you chose, Mom tells me, an angel came and said: ‘The little girl would like to come in now. She wants to know if that is ok.

I didn’t even need a pregnancy test, is what Mom says. You were to be female, and this was to be a gift, she says, but I’m not sure for whom. I started practicing my prayers young, clapping along to rhythm and Miiiiiiiss Susie

had a steamboat / The steamboat had a bell (DING DING) / Miss Susie went to heaven / The steamboat went to went to / Hello Operator / Please give me Number 9 / And if you disconnect me / I’ll kick you from / Behind the ‘frigerator /

There was a piece of glass / Miss Susie sat upon it / And broke her little / Ask me no more questions / Tell me no more lies / The boys are in the bathroom / Zipping up their / Flies are in the meadow / The bees are in the park /

 

Miss Susie and her boyfriend:

are kissing / In the D-A-R-K, D-A-R-K, dark dark / Darker than the ocean / Darker than the sea / Darker than the underpants / My mom just put on me! / I know I know my Ma / I know I know my Pa / I know I know my sister with

the forty-acre bra! Mom gave me bras for Christmas. Plush pink with tiny beading and gems; white with red embroidery; black lace. EMBRACE THE GODDESS. Angel Butt. Dazzle Whapper (because I kicked in the womb). Tiny Pomegranate

(because of my round ass cheeks). Boogie Bear (for the dancing). All of my goddesses lined up at the temple of 32DDD. Feminine Power is something to admit we have. I fall to my knees under the weight of elastic straps; All hail femininity!

 

Petticoat Bruncheon at Bump & Grind on 17th Ave.

Mom was slinging burgers and cases of tomatoes for Roma Foods like forever; I was the only kid allowed in the dives and nighttime greasy spoons. Velvet scrunchies, plastic butterfly clips at the bar. All the waitresses in drag

liked to show me their silicone bra inserts and encouraged me to touch. Mom big-boned blushed even though she spent the edge of the 70s and 80s doing makeup for queens in McLean, Virginia outside of D.C. Something about protecting

my girlhood from their Big Womanness. Mom learned to be afraid of her own Big Womanness too young to know different. At the hot sulfur swimming pool in Idaho Springs, Mom lost her own squishy ladies once. MOMMY

YOUR BOOOBIES ARE FLOATING AWAY is what I screamed, helpfully. She taught me hot rollers, taught me bronzer, a white dot at the inside of each eye. Taught me highlights, lowlights, taught me Hey Baby, and to dangle a piece of cheese.

 

Unemployment White

Once upon a time (in another time, in The Other Time), Mom sold paperclips. Swivel chairs, laser printers, three-ring binders I snapped open and shut till they lost their snap. Man in a blue suit, man in a grey suit, man in tan. Man in a black suit, man

in a black suit, man in pinstripes and a tie. Mom: lemon stilettos, black patent leather with ruby buckles the size of baby fists, pink satin pumps, leather knee highs on four inches of lift. Red toes wedged to a point. Cobalt suede. Gold jacket

stitched with ropes like curtains from windows of a palace run by a queen and only a queen. No one knew she was pregnant until month nine; she hid me in hair teased up to double the height of her face, shoulder pads with extra shoulder pads

slipped in, boxy blazer on paisley silk patterned like 1950s tile with an Alice in Wonderland watch across one tit. Years later, she drank two-buck chuck Chardonnay on unemployment because Corporate America said she was Too—

 

[Religious] Science is Our Savior

PERSONAL IMMORTALITY. PERSONAL POWER. PERSONAL REVELATION. HEAVEN ON EARTH. I was the youngest ever to sit in the pews and take the classes in the big white dome on Wednesdays and Saturdays to become a member,

out 6th Avenue or Alameda to Lakewood, depending on traffic. Mom’s most important commandment is that you have to have God, no matter what she looks like. When Bird Flu hit, we started stockpiling (hail Science! hail the Mind!): basement full

of beans in bins stacked to the ceiling, a hot tub for water storage, composting toilets and everything we’d need to build a solar stove. Tin foil and iodine. Peanut butter, StarKist tuna fish tins, bags of flour, bags of flour, freeze dried meat. I BELIEVE

IN THE ETERNALITY, THE IMMORTALITY, AND THE CONTINUITY OF THE INDIVIDUAL SOUL, FOREVER AND EVER EXPANDING (into the garage: green water tank so big we had it delivered in nighttime). The law is: Never tell a soul.

 

“There never was such a bird!”

The immutable God stuff is the severance. Mom’s branch came from Grandpa’s Rumi and his crazy. Uncle grafted out the drinking and spirituality. We all have the same eyes except Mom. Green-brown with orange around the edges

is called “Muckledyduck” according to Grandma (at least that’s what she told Uncle every day until his driver’s test when he listed MUCKLEDYDUCK at the DMV and got laughed at pretty bad). We learn to clean ourselves

of the shames, but NEVER USE COMET WITH SCRUBBING BUBBLES UNLESS YOU WANNA DIE, and that includes no toilet ammonia with the blue bleach trays Mom uses to pearl her teeth. I take it out

of the law that Grandpa died on Valentine’s Day and Criminal Cousin was the one by the hospice bed; I take it out of the law that Grandma got murdered by a family tree. We take lemon oil to the wood again and load up Godspell

and Pippin and stand on the coffee table to dance our graceless dance with lots of hips and one knee bent, each. Reacting and reacting and Mom asks if I’ve made my Miracle Action Plan today and then Mom gasps and takes her big fist and does

a magic trick and removes her lips off of her face and throws them away because the world will make your miracles ugly and I should really keep mine to myself. Grandpa used to steal his nose and my nose like that, right off our faces with a

POP from somewhere hidden in his mouth. He held my nose between his fingers before swallowing it whole with a gulp. Grandpa and Grandma once came for Christmas with a wooden table just my size and wooden chairs and red aprons and

a tea party: the daintiest of ceremonies. Grandpa held my hands, but Mom says he could never read me. Strange little doll, birdbones half the size of anyone in the family. We name the turkey Esmerelda; we bless it with Grandpa’s liturgy.