A Tendency toward Violence

Glue the slivers of your great-grandfather’s skull

back together with spit. You might have to hold it

in place until it sets, but first, pick the brain

matter blowback from his wife’s nightdress,

and poke it back through the holes. You once told

her you’d be a doctor, a lawyer, someone

better at filling the family’s gaps. You lied.

You’re grown now, and you still can’t figure out

where all the pieces go. See if you can’t find

the bullet, which might not have been

in his head at all. (No one tells this story,

and, according to your bourgie cousin, neither

should you.) It might have ambled to the surface;

feel for bumps on his skin, check the roof of his mouth

under the composite bridge if there is one. When

you asked your mother Was he a womanizer? A cheat? Just bad?

she said no, but you have both wrapped

your legs around disasters and called them gods.

Prop him up: palms on his knees in the old chair.

Leave his butter cookies under the cushion

so when a younger you comes sugartoothed and begging,

they’re waiting like yellow, crisp commas. Unlight

the match. Let the mattress cool to a white pill.

Remove the matchbook from his wife’s hands;

remove her from the room—give him a little

peace. Or you can leave her there, just make her

good. Harvest a bit of   bone from her sternum

to let the devils free so that, later,

when your youngest uncle pins you down

for being sassy, for stealing the remote

—for being seven—and demands

you name the legions that left the great-

grandmother to enter you, his mouth

gapes like a grouper, with nothing to say.

Disappear the tools from both their hands.

You are bigger than the story of being pinned.

In the ancestral yard, gather the dingy chickens

and Butch with his golden withers, who is chasing the cat

that same uncle plucked eyeless with a clothes hanger.

Gather the sisters in the other house, too, naked

and soapy in the steel tub. Seal them in wax,

so that no one who ever touches them can leave

a trace. And the mother, wrangling their hair

with bergamot and water, with the pig-

colored brush and its stout bristles—seal the hole

blown through her chest when the father left.

Which father? Any father. Take your pick.

Which hole? Every hole she hides with blouses

and the printed scarves she shouts loose in church.

Make all fathers inconsequential except one,

for whom you will pinch a crease into a pair

of  trousers and walk him from one house to another,

maybe carrying the cookies as a gift; maybe carrying

milk from the dairy where the white owner told him

he shouldn’t have more children; where he probably

said nothing, just dipped the cow’s udder

into a pan of chlorinated water, the premonition

of his wife’s homicidal want as acrid as the dung

curdling the air. Now he is coming

to live with the daughters’ daughters—the speckled line

that slipped through just before the culling. And even though

you didn’t know him well enough to know

what he might do once he arrives,

such ignorance has never stopped you before.