India’s Reviews > Sister: A Novel in Poems > Status Update

"simply
bury it, but bury it
alive."

'One Hundred and Five Times' is chilling.

"If you were in the driveway
I didn't see you,
a seven-year-old, knock-kneed kids
kicking gravel
with the side of your bare
foot.

I was in that white care - half tank of gas,
loud muffler ready to drive North
and fast,
no apologies,
no saying
goodbye."

"The man flipped
his abacus, counted
every bead of pain
to add up
to excuse."

"We were
afraid, and like a pack of hungry
dogs, we marked
each other - safety pins and blood,
scratched things like 'best friends
forever' then vomited
bile into the mud."

"The kids I knew, like me, all came
straight from the mud, and with legs still
mosquito=pocked and the smell of snake
in our hair, we struck our father's
lighter in one hand and held out
our mother's aerosol in the other,
sprayed fuck-you balls
of fire into the air."

"No, this despair
is real, let me say it
plain - did you feel loved, ever,
by me?"

"We have been told
men can sniff us out,
so like frightened animals
burying scent
we hide our waste,
we wrap it
twice in toilet paper,
squirrel it to the bottom
of the can. Because she said,

'only a girl who doesn't know no
better would humiliate her daddy
with a smell like that,' because his punch-
line was 'I don't trust anything
that bleeds for five days
and lives."

"It was then I stole mama's cigarettes, the ones she wasn't supposed to be smoking, and smoked them out the bathroom window, my lips pressed to the grain of the flyspecked screen."

"I wanted to go
but mostly I wanted
a mother to notice I was gone"