I rearrange my grandmother in loose-leaf pages,each poem a memory, a sterling trinket in a felt pouchI keep by my side, often touching it throughoutthe day, the way one checks a phonethrough a pocket. There is the poem whereshe teaches me about the many tastes and statesof salt, the one where I learn to measurefor biscuits using my hands: a palmful of lard,a turn of the wrist for a pour of buttermilk.
She remembered growing up poor in Kentucky,going to town in a horse-pulled buggy—an old marename Beatrice—after a girl that once caught mygreat-grandfather’s eye, something I’ve savedfor a future piece. Her father’s cruel yet lovinglegacy continues to this day within meand my daughter: quick to love, quicker to anger.
For this I now take a pill, a form of bipolar disorderthat is spread out along the whole of my family tree,like an infected dogwood with large leaf spots.I told my uncle about Risperidone after his lastepisode, every door ripped from its hinges.I told my brother after he grew angry and threwhis girlfriend out because she found out he wascheating. So far, no takers.
There is a form of adrenaline that comes with rage,the kind I always imagined could lift cars offchildren, hit baseballs over fences, but I onlyknow fists through sheetrock, broken plates,and an arm through whatever stands in my way.
My grandmother married a man like her father,full of laughter and mirth on a short fuse, tellinghow she would sometimes go for walks on the farmwhen she felt the thunder building in his mind,the small ripples in the water’s surfacethat indicate something big is right below.
My children called it walking on eggshells, knewwhen I had this charged energy within me and wasready to single out any nonsense reason to lashout. I was a calculated hothead, a man tryingto apply logic to a misaligned emotional state.This anger was always followed by regret and guilt,which I tried to justify away but never could.It was like trying to assign meaning to a tornadoor a plague, that somehow the victim played arole in all this.
My son is like my father, mostly calm, onlyoccasional anger bubbling up in understandablemeasure. He was the steady hand on mine thattried to assuage the monster within me when itsurfaced: a 30-pound catfish covered in scarsand missing part of its left soft dorsal fin.I do not miss it, swimming through life with a hookin my mouth because no line was strong enoughto reel me in.
My grandmother lived in the country and I loved itwhen she accelerated on the gravel roadnear her house, the car shaking like a bullbefore it throws the rider.
I am now the person I intend to be, a pileof expired maps on my passenger seat as I tryto navigate the days before me, the roadtransitioning from gravel to blacktop.
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