I am the only woman in my family who learned how to love herself.
My grandmother came from brick buildings walled in by cornfields
with tougher husks than her own skin. Shared cigarettes with strangers
just to touch someone else’s hand when they passed the lighter.
Whenever her breath froze in the air during winter,
it formed the words I’m sorry even before evaporation.
Every exhale was an apology to the world for letting her into it.
Seven children but the doctor wouldn’t prescribe birth control;
most never knew their father’s last name, let alone middle or first.
Each time I look at her stained photograph in the old family abum,
I see seven different synonyms for regret instead of her wrinkled face.
My mother grew up with a stomach like a broken vacuum that puked up
everything that was sucked into it. She kissed the toilet bowl
more times than my forehead at night. After I moved out of the house,
I finally learned that she’d been proofreading her genes for typos
in the DNA and found so many that turning her body inside out
was the only way to erase them all. I hope to God I don’t ever fall
in love with spellcheck too, because some drafts just can’t be rewritten.
I grew up as a rusty bicycle without training wheels,
a piano perched on the edge of an eight-story building.
I was just following the paths of the women before me.
But when every heartbeat started feeling like an excuse,
I decided it was time to stop taking the blame for my own genetics.
So I started looking in mirrors like I was crossing a street:
left and then right and then left again, because I’d spent far too long
crashing in the oncoming headlights of my own reflection.