Anderson - Shout: a poetry memoir

He had to slap me, she repeated. I was screaming, screaming for reasons too many to count. The full story came out in gingerbread crumbs dropped to show me the way. After the meltdown, the attack, they had to ride the train home to repair the damage to her face home to the mountains, to their parents to a clucking village of spite, her broken teeth vibrating in bloody sockets, her husband horrified at the war hed declared on his beloved, he turned toward the aisle thinking of escape. Her backbone crumbling under the weight of her heart, she fixed her eyes on the dark forest just beyond the glass. He had to. He had to.

The lie told to friends was that she fell, clumsy, tumbled down the stairs so many broken teeth, poor thing bad things happen in big cities, you know. The truth was that the stress of fighting the ghosts in his head broke him that night and as they argued my father didnt just slap my mother. He beat her. But beatings didnt fit in the fairy tales she liked to tell herself so she sugarcoated the story to make it easier to swallow. The town dentist, a family friend, didnt charge for his labor gently apologized with every tooth. They lived with her parents all summer while her mouth healed, waiting for the false teeth, they tiptoed but they did not touch.

After the stitches came out after she learned to mix tooth powder with water to make the glue that held her mouth together, after five miscarriages, five never-born sons, my parents tried again and created me. He didnt ever hit her again, but she lived in the fear that he would, which had everything to do with her habits of silence.

unclean

I said shit in front of the church ladies gathered in our kitchen for coffee and doughnuts, three-year-old me: the potato-shaped, sturdy-legged parrot-tongued echo chamber I fell down, scraped my knee, and said shit in frustration, the word I had learned from my mother crammed and dammed into the corseted life of a ministers wife where she couldnt say shit if she had a mouthful. But alone, with me, she could, and did frequently. That day in the kitchen, as the church ladies eyed my mothers handmade curtains, measuring her skills, I baby-cursed and was snatched from the floor. Shoving a bar of soap into the mouth of a child was then a common practice, church lady approved, for scrubbing dirty words from the minds of the young, the violence of generational silence brutally handed down.