• Languid wafting citrus essence and strawberry flesh put shoulder to cake of tax-sheltering steer and dung. Triumphant emergence of fruity nose-balls recalls memories of itself: a non-discrete pleasure searching for a happy memory. But all I have is dirt. My Grandmother’s dirt is now someone else’s lawn. Her keepsakes and cedar boxes of hope are in my chest like an ulcer. Lost to some auctioneer’s tripping tongue or some old thrift shoppe. Some new grand-daughter seeking a heritage… culturing her American heart with some other family’s bacterial jewels.

    I want my leaves and my rusty fence. They are not yours. I played and fought and watched animals get killed and eaten. I heard old women be strong; and sitting on that porch- wide-eyed and voracious- I learned how to forgive weak men. The deed to that mud is a constricting band around my ribs, and all you know is how long it takes to drive to town. My grandmother scrubbed my flat body before she took us there. It took us all day. That’s how long my commute to Tampa took when you don’t factor in the preaching before and the baking after.

    When you don’t factor the failure. When you don’t factor how one generation can undo a long line of struggle and babies and courage. When you don’t factor that I came after that one generation, you can’t see the ties, the cords, the chains that reach up out of your flower bed and strangle my heart. You see a car sideways in the end of your driveway, pausing. Probably someone checking their map or chatting on their cell phone. From your window I don’t look like someone who wishes you were dead.