I remember best the sound
of breaking glass, my mother’s tears.
I got a bike for my fourth birthday,
but my father couldn’t teach me to ride it,
the same way I couldn’t be taught
to tie my shoes, because I refused
to be bullied into learning anything.
My sister beheaded my dolls
and threw their corpses into
the river that ran past our house.
I watched them float away,
bound for parts unknown.
After my only friend died of cancer,
I dreamed of drowning in that water.
Her mother gave us her old things,
and so I wore a dead girl’s clothes.
Life felt odd to me, even then,
as new as I was to it, a tiny pebble,
caught between the river and the highway,
and in the shadow of the mountain.

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. My first solid memories are of around the time when I turned four. I remember my birthday and I remember my parents fighting. We lived in a little red house next to the Cumberland River, in Partridge, Kentucky, near my grandparents' houses. The house was in a little valley in between mountains, with the river on one side and a highway on the other. We moved away to St. Louis when I was five. The house is still there, but it's falling apart, so no one can live in it. They moved the highway and the river, though. Progress marches on. There's a picture of the house here.

Posted on 11/07/2011
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