Hey y’all,
Right now I’m at a cafe, catching up with work and writing that I need to do because I spent the day in bed with my joints and fascia rebelling against me.
I’m not going to stumble through some homily on taking care of yourself and respecting the process of aging, or watching out for replacing one eating disorder for another over the course of two decades, or learning to accept that you’re finally in a place where you can say “i’m working from home because i can’t really move” and nobody questions it, even if you’ve never had that before, even if nobody in your family has had that ever, even if if if if if. Frankly, that’s all for some other time, when I can make it art and not rambling.
Speaking of: I wanted to give you another poem! This one is about being fourteen and reckoning with the fact that you can’t quite shake off your family yet. It’s below the line.
My next piece will likely take a bit longer to put together, so I wanted to give this to you now.
Take care, kittens,
KJ
eustis, florida
we are driving on the same lake county road for twenty-five minutes, looking for a turn that should have happened after ten—
sunbaked, crisped olive skin, hunting for a friendly’s—“they have smiley-face ice cream cones,” you bark at us every forty miles
since daybreak. it is well past noon; you have not once hit the speed limit, nor turned on the a/c. maybe because you’d been a cop,
maybe because you are secretly drunk, maybe because the derelict van cannot go above sixty, a living turnpike nightmare.
you pull off the road, the green van beeping like a tractor trailer. you turn to my cousin, who refuses to put on his seatbelt,
yell “may god damn you!” my mother then leads us through prayers, two generations of catholics driven by a telephone psychic.
i am told this is a vacation. i am told some families, but not us, do this every year. i am told to enjoy myself. i am told to be enjoyable.
years later, you’d move to that same scrub-ass part of florida, leaving miami beach for a spiritualist community where you’d practice massage.
i never asked; you never answered. you sold me your car—a champagne hatchback death trap that avoided achieving the speed limit—
and you spent the entire time singing a song you wanted to copyright, “gonna ride my harley to heaven.” you had a filing cabinet
filled with knives. my other cousin lived in your spare bedroom with her daughter and infection-yellow hair. the last time i saw you
i pulled up your pants in the restaurant bathroom; you were too drunk to stand up from the blood-streaked floor; your wife
kept eating her french fries. we left the next morning, my mother saying morning prayers without a goodbye. i haven’t been back
to scrub-ass florida in so long. i miss the rain, the thick low sky. our great big stupid world and family makes it feel so goddamn small.