There was no electricity,
and mosquito larvae in the well,
squirming into my nightmares,
making a space for themselves next to
the way my brother screamed
when my father hit him
with the switch with thorns on it.
This was the place where my childhood died,
choking on dirty rain water,
eyes swelled shut and bones broken,
suffocating in the trunk of an old car,
next to the corpses of murdered dogs.
I imagined that I could get away from it.
Now I wince with embarrassment,
remembering the silly little girl
who didn't realize that the past
always finds a way to burrow into you,
to make itself a permanent ache.

11/07/2011

Author's Note: So, I was inspired by a friend of mine, who's been posting these poems lately with state abbreviations as the titles, and I thought, I could write poems about the different places where I've lived. The thing is, of course, that if you follow my poetry, or you know me, some of this stuff is going to be familiar to you, and I'm not trying to repeat myself, just trying to get a solid picture of what each place means to me in my mind. When I was ten, we moved to a farm outside Milltown, Indiana. For a long time, we didn't have any electricity, and for an even longer time, we didn't have any running water. We were very poor and my father spent most of his time being drunk and abusive. All that, and it was still the longest I ever lived in one place. Five years. Until this year, which makes five years that I've lived in the apartment I live in now, which I totally need to move out of, because it's too little. But I fear change. For obvious reasons.

Posted on 11/07/2011
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