A Poem to Remember Her

A poem written for my grandmother on her birthday this year.

In a world
(and on a block)
that made me feel like
I wasn't shit
unless I was gonna bang
with the boys—
I had my grandmother.

After my parents split,
And we had no place to live
it was your burnt-sienna couches
where we took refuge &
could let our eyelashes meet at night.

1940 Census.
Itskalis, _________
Helen. 11.
North Artesian,
Avenue.

You grew up in
Ward 28
playing kick the can
in the dust of FDR & Capone
Chicago.

Greek & Albanian
you married a Mexican
against tradition.

A rebel,
even if you didn't identify
as one.

But your only son,
golden nucleus child,
was found
slashed
&
frozen
in the trunk of a rental car near O’Hare.

Never able to make his final escape,
while simultaneously finally escaping.

Closed-casket.
This way he couldn’t hear the chorus
lamenting a requiem.
These were the nights when you realized
that locking your eyelashes
couldn’t help you un-see.

You would later tell me,
"he was a good kid. I loved him. I loved him more than the girls."

That’s when they say he picked up the bottle
and never put it down.

“We told you not to marry a spic.”

Your son’s sister, my aunt & godmother—
a hustler with a knack
for stolen things like credit cards & cars,
ice-cream, uppers and Lionel Richie.
You had to make a decision and you kicked her out.
She left her baby with you,
the baby whose father would fall victim to AIDS,
and soon after became a freshman at Dwight Correctional Facility
or as she called it, Dwight University.

And there we were
under the lethargic wing of your youngest daughter,
Attempting ineptly to be crafters
of a nest made from the fabric encasing
your burnt-sienna polyester sofas,
trying to start over.

From seven until college you were
mom, dad, mentor, hugs, food & glue.
While my mom sunk deeper into the folds
of the burnt-sienna, before she saw ghosts &
put too much blow up her nose
you placed both hands on my shoulders &
made me promise to get an education &
not mirror the life that surrounded us.

To remember where we came from,
but to forget where we came from.

“Don’t talk like that!”
“Like what?”
“Like THAT.”
“Why, tho?”
“Because ain’t ain’t a word.”
“If it ain’t a word
then why you saying it,
tho?”

our struggle,
our ebb & flow.

You taught me to believe in prayers & miracles
by telling stories of tears trickling down
a virgin’s face, with salmon gel tips tickling my back slowly
when I was a kid and when I came back from—

the accomplishment you were so proud
to tell your friends at church about.
I stayed beside you, thirsty for the light that was cast
when you beamed about me being at a real university.

Unlike your son, who got whacked, you died slow.
a fall on the ice and your head slightly cracked—
revealing a genesis of dementia, red slushie
leaking into the snow.

Do you remember when you broke
our family’s code of silence
by asking me real talk, “Did they cut you?”

The question made me want
to cough up blood
& let it splatter on the glass table,
the only thing between our elbows
and the gravity of it all.

When it was in its last stages
I visited you at rehab.
Your soft eyes,
spooned by loose wrinkles of yarn &
cuddled by gray eyelashes,
whiplashed like a summer hail storm.

Your nails, now a mosaic of glue & broken terracotta
dug between the tendons in my hand

“Get. me. out. of. here.”

With mask firmly on I said behind tears

“I can’t, tho.”

And sulked off to the broken potholed streets below.

When you laid in the center of our steadfast
stares on crispy white sheets
we watched as our nucleus’ chest did its
best impersonation
of the Mediterranean Sea.

[Heave in. Heave out. Heave in. Heave out. Heave in. Heave…]

Why didn’t we ever look that rapt upon you before?
Why did we wait for the disease to rapture your body,
and threaten to send you to [heave in…

heave out.]

How is it possible that we never back-down
from anything, sometimes to our detriment,
and yet we sat by and watched you die
of dehydration & starvation?

Why did I pretend again, like I didn’t have the power to take you out of there?

A pall bearer lowers your body into semi-thawed
ice-cream birthday cake earth
[Heave in. Heave out.]
after that blizzard everyone still talks about,
[Heave in. Heave out.]
dirt and red roses collapse around you
[Heave in. Heave out.]
as your casket burrows and disappears behind
thorny green eyelashes.

[Heave out.]