American Memoir
This is a poem about gun violence
I remember the first day my dad couldn’t
explain why. Maddie and I got in the car,
and he didn’t speak until we dropped her
off. I thought, weird. I thought, I hope
we have lemonade at home. I thought,
where did I leave my shin guards?
My dad pulled the car over after one street.
He said something bad had happened
at an elementary school in Connecticut,
and did I have any questions. I didn’t.
We practiced dying twice a year––
I was twelve and I just hoped I’d be under
the same desk as Jackson. It was a public school
in Colorado after Columbine. It was the same year
everyone I knew stopped going to the movies
because a man killed twelve people at a midnight
showing fifteen minutes from my house. We had
so many lock-ins, they stopped announcing them.
Magdalen and I passed a single grape lollipop back
and forth. I read half of Jane Eyre. I still know how
to calculate the area of a hexagon, can discuss
genomic variation in deer populations. And
the whole time, I knew where the emergency
exits were. I always know where the emergency exits are.
This is not a story about our country, it’s a story about me
in our country. Poetry gave me a microscope,
but I probably need a satellite somewhere cold and iridescent
in the sky. My face feels too warm. I can’t tell you anything,
except I was chronically early to swim practice and therefore
the only person who had to hide with my coach
while someone walked inside the building with a gun.
I was hoping I was going to beat Kate in the 100 freestyle.
I was wearing a purple swim suit under my school clothes,
because I couldn’t get naked in that freezing, cement locker room.
My shoulders were raw and red with the straps
when I hid behind the boiler with Dave. He was such
a funny guy, a really good coach. He used to call
our whole team ‘little girl’––
Little girl, you better get your butt in the water.
Little girl, I know you can swim faster than that.
Little girl, beat her to the wall. We thought it was
hilarious: we were sixteen, we were so old––
but we weren’t; I wasn’t; I was a little girl.
And nothing happened then or at work
the next year, or when I went to college
and someone drove down main street
shooting. I remember thinking all those times,
that I couldn’t die because
I hadn’t been in love yet. I guess that’s
the kind of God I have. I couldn’t imagine
a better universe than that. Isn’t that sad?
I wrote a poem about it and a magazine mailed me
a thousand dollar check. I spent it on orange juice,
and gas for my boyfriend’s car. It wasn’t blood money;
I was alive. I could ask for ice cubes at the diner
and plunk them into my green and white coffee mug
like a movie star, or a kid. I bought clothes that fit;
I kept getting smaller. There were a lot of reasons,
but I don’t think enough about how it got really bad
during those years where I kept having to hide
below windows. The first time I slept with
someone, it was because there was a shooting
in Pittsburgh, and he didn’t want to be alone.
I left mint chapstick all over his arms, and
he never got mad at me for all the eye-makeup
on his pillows. Years later,
a hurricane drill in northern Spain:
I made some comment about having done
these kinds of things millions of times.
And I looked up and my co-teacher was weeping.
At the end of class, every single student
met my eyes. They kissed my cheeks.
They said in their accents (like spoons scooping water)
Amer-ica––it sounded like something snapped in half.
Doug and I discuss how to discuss the shooting
a few blocks from the university
we’re teaching at. How do we talk about it
to the freshman? How do we talk about anything?
We’re the teachers now. I get the emails
that tell me how scared I should be today.
I am always so scared today. Don’t you feel it
in your body? How many times you didn’t
die? How many times it wasn’t you
in the news? This is one of those poems
I don’t know how to end. Because it never ends.
It keeps never ending. Let me say it another way:
I used to really love
the smell of chlorine.