Perrin

The one thing that never changed about my mother was that her feet hurt. She worked two jobs my whole childhood to pay the bills in a tiny Missouri apartment that sat halfway underground and had shingles falling off. We were surrounded by poor people like us, and we were one of the only white families in the neighborhood. I remember hearing about people being stabbed or setting fire to the buildings or some kid drowning in the pool. I remember being called a cracker. I remember drug dealers by the crab apple trees.

But I remember crossing the highway on foot to pick cattails in the trailer park, my mother pressing them into bookmarks. And crawling hundreds of yards through the drainage tunnels that opened up into the woods, where some of us would sit still in the trees in the summertime, looking out over things, growing up. I remember my exhausted mother reading to me half an hour every night—six straight years in 500 square feet—until I started kindergarten. We were broke, and we were alone, but I remember good times. I remember laughing and hearing people laughing and never feeling like I didn’t have enough.

My mother is proud and unafraid. She sits with this legendary shamelessness. She tells me, “Listen: you are never too good for anything.” In the spectrum of my life, the truest version of myself is the 9-year old me, the skinny blonde kid who found adventure tramping through a few small acres of Midwestern backwood, the kid who hadn’t forgotten his mother is stronger than everyone else.

I wrote this poem about a time when I was 9:

Gunpowder cornfield, July--
long time ago--
Grown-up asks over the fireworks
if the real me is still in there
pointing at my chest.
I don't say anything.
I am young and afraid.
I wish I'd yelled over the explosions what I feel now:

Yes I'm in here.
I'm in here with the energy of a bomb.
I'm knighthood. I'm roller coaster.
I'm in here gaining speed.
In here flipping full beer cans into the air
vaporizing them with a shotgun.
White-knuckle nosedive

slipping out of handcuffs.

Racing coal trains.
Bringing home dinner on my shoulders.
I'm spitting blood between rounds in here.
I'm in here with a sledge hammer.
I'm in here swimming for my life.
I'm in here on a trampoline.

If you can't see it
one of us must be dying.