Here is the problem sometimes, as far as I can see, with moving from poverty to a monied existence and trying to erase your roots:

Your friends will never understand your memories of hot tar on your tongue from freshly laid roads when you couldn’t afford bubblegum at a nickel a pop.

You will always, always have to buy the right purses and the right clothes to prove your worth/but you will never, ever wear them right/because there’s something about the way/they hang off your shoulders/the way they sag from your bones/that lacks the lightness and ease with which others stride through life

You will try and talk about family the way they do/but they had warm-lit Chrsitmases and healthy meals and shiny, shiny hair/nannies who taught them french/puppies who licked their toes

Different from the stray you took in/tattered like your own hope/angry like the teeth you bared when your mother’s new boyfriend came into your room at night-

They will never understand going to a beauty parlor instead of your own brother’s funeral/because sometimes mourning takes different forms/and sometimes you can’t be in a room with the grief that is there in you always, anyways

They will never understand the way pain is a second language, like sorrow/and sometimes when you don’t have the words/because it’s not so simple/well, sometimes only razors and tendons can do the talking

And there’s the way they laugh at you/the way they take for granted the ease of your performance/the way you, wide-eyed and eager/tried to love them so young, the way they couldn’t understand/why it was so important/why anything/would ever/be/ important

But what they didn’t know is that the soul atrophies above $75 grand a year/and that their lives and petulancies were small, small/and that you flattered them and gave them a blessing/when you even tried to share the depths of your grief

And I love you./I came from inside you, and you,/and you carried me and your anguish at once/and I steeped it in./Warm bags of tea, lost hope, dead end jobs

And you married up/but ‘up’ means you were looked at with foreign eyes,/and at first you were exotic, the last of the hottentots/

you made them feel virile, strong/when they drank from flows through you

and they whispered about you in dark corners, ungrateful,/and banished you to pull your own teeth out/one/by one/by one

and how can i say i am sorry that you chose between being a dirty feral girl and medicating yourself into your current, captive state?

how can i say how sorry i am when your face grew pallid and i knew you stayed in bed because you were promised safety and you knew the pills were it?

and how can i say what it is to watch hands glaze over mouth glaze over thighs when addiction is fed by your aching husband who works two jobs to feed your endless void?

you will never pass. they know your brother molested you under the dank stairs while they learned the proper way to lay out silverware for a dinner party.

you will never pass. they know you cleaned houses for a living and tore open your veins and longed to bring your dead brother, your young son, back from the grave.

you will never pass. no one has ever died in their world, and no one has ever lost -/ there have been polite burials with velvet, satin and mahogany caskets and they are heavy with the weight of everything unsaid but not heavy with the weight of any lost people, because there were never any humans there/

Your mother beat you until you forgot.

Your rich relatives stopped coming around because the messy complexities of your life complicated theirs.

You tried to rend your past from yourself,/but it left you hollow,/and I breathe out sandpaper and steel wool,/broken glass and skin against the friction of skin,/rope burns and tree bark torn from my flesh and I cherish you.

You have lost your first names. You have bent under the weight of too-heavy lies. Your mother whispers promises to you in the late fall wind, and your father calls out his apologies from beyond the sanitorium walls

I didn’t mean for this./I didn’t mean for this./I didn’t mean for this.