16/30: Questions I want to ask my grandmothers

Tell me your favorite shade of lipstick.
What was the weather on the day my parent was born?
What did you dream of becoming when you were young?
How close did you get?
Where were you when they told you they were going to have me?
What were you wearing when they told you they had me?
How many countries did you manage to see?
How many lovers did you take?
How old were you the first time you made love?  To whom?
Did you lose your virginity or did you gain experience?
When did you first vote?
How many regrets do you have?  Where do you store them?
What one thing could you never do without?
What would you change?  How would you change
yourself?  Do you forgive me for being queer?
Do you forgive me for being feminist?  Do you forgive me
for cursing, for fucking, for marching in the streets,
for holding signs, for supporting immigrants
and all sorts of things you never heard of, never
thought about?  Do you forgive
that I will never be a grandmother nor even
a mother for that matter?  Did you create
any art?  Where did you leave it?  How can I find it?
Why did you leave me so soon?  When
are you coming back?

day 9 pome 9 / 30: the feminist cooks

Writing this poem is a feminist act.

This poem starts in my mother's kitchen, the way she showed us to cook
from scratch, to set the table, to host, to care
for and about every person's needs.

For unrelated reasons, I had to divorce my mother.

Divorcing my mother was a feminist act.

Picture me,
5'11" broad shoulders long feet
standing tall and strong and proud
barefoot in my kitchen at home.

Because damnit, that's how I like to be.

I still cook from scratch.
You want soup?  Let me get some bones
and roast them for stock.  Ravioli?
I'll get the pasta mold and roll dough.
Moussaka?  Don't even threaten me
with a good time.

I like the food you got to put your love into
for it to come out right, I'm about that
cook all day type shit, the kind of recipes
that leave your whole kitchen covered
in trails of flour kisses.

And while there may never be
pitter patters of smaller bare feet tugging
at my apron strings,
I do still have apron strings.
My grandmother's green checkered apron
is my habit, my holy robe.

My grandmother was not a feminist.
My grandmother was a racist.
Speaking this truth about her is a feminist act.
I thank goodness she died
before I realized I was queer.

My grandmother wasn't even as open minded
as those people who say, "Oh, I believe in equality,
but I'm not a feminist."
"Oh, I can't be a feminist, I don't hate men."

Definitions are fucking hard, y'all.

Define love.  Define orange.  Define space.
Define feminist.

Dame Rebecca West said:
"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."

My man gets hungry, y'all.
And I show my love through food.
He's having a tough week, I'll pack lunches to go in the nighttime,
leave them on display in the fridge,
pizzadillas, chicken salad wraps, sandwiches
that would make Dogwood cry, mother fucking
fruit roll ups, y'all.

Feminism, to me, means doing what the fuck I want
how the fuck I want
when the fuck I want
and may any preconceived notions about what it means in relation to my gender
fuck themselves right off.
Feminism means caring for others, too.  Others' needs, others' rights.

And when I stand up here tonight and say goddamnit, yes,
I cook from scratch for my man barefoot in my kitchen,
because I choose to,
because I love to,
goddamnit,
that's a feminist act.

9/30: grand folks jelly

In this world we live in today with the whole damn
internet I visit my friend's profile page and see
an entire folder of photos labeled "Gramma Jean!"
just like that, exclamation mark and all. In one
she wears a pirate hat, grinning, in another,
silly sunglasses and a genuine laugh. One picture
is of her at the base of a giant statue of Superman,
one hand planted firmly on his tall red boots,
the other flung out to the side. My favorite,
which is to say, the one that makes me hate
my friend the most, is the one in which Gramma Jean
has climbed behind a plywood cutout of
Supergirl's body. We're talking six feet tall
and fine as hell, a patriotic hourglass, and the smile
on her face is priceless, y'all, and the caption
is a quote from Gramma Jean! herself, it says, "this
is how I really look, not like a little old lady,"
as if she had to tell us. My father's father

died before I was born.

I once dated a boy
with three whole sets of grandparents. He was
thirty years old. One set had divorced early on
and happily remarried and he legitimately had
three entire pairs of grandparents. He called them
all the time on the phone. My mother's father died

when I was two years old. There is a photograph
in which he is holding me; in this picture his lap
reminds me of the statue of Abraham Lincoln: vast
and steady as stone. I have, of course, no memory
of him at all.

Another friend not only has both sets of grandparents
but for most of his young life had his great grandparents,
too. My mother's mother died when I was nine and I
did not handle it well. My father's mother physically died
my junior year of high school, but her mind went
years before that. I see photos of a longtime friend
on her profile page with her arms thrown around the neck
of her grandfather. My friend is nearly forty.
The old man may be wearing wrinkles and age spots
but his smile is young, and wild, and wide. I cry.

6/30: Write a letter to someone dead.

Dear Gin:

I'd like to say first that I'm sorry
I haven't talked to you in so long but now
that you're dead it's difficult,
naturally, I'm sure you understand.
To be fair, I haven't heard much
from you either. I guess I wanted
to thank you for a few things. First,

for trying so hard to make me a lady.
Sit up straight and cross your legs and
use the smallest fork first and all
the other seemingly trivial things
you'd remind me of that added up
to make a larger message: be lady-
like. And I am. Lady-like, anyway.
Then, for being so darned beautiful

in all of your old photos, for meaning
that I came from Beautiful Stock, that I
might one day grow up to be beautiful too,
and for the other photos, all the ones
of you in foreign countries, which gave
me permission to travel, in the way those other
photos gave me permission to be beautiful.
It's important to have permission
to be beautiful, I think, what with all
the messages women get today, and also
to be able to travel on your own. Thank you

for so many things. Thank you for
every single school year, the way you would
send my mother, my sister, and I off
to the big city with your credit card
because we two girls would outgrow our clothes
too fast for our parents' budget,
and you knew this, and you loved us
and wanted us to have nice things. Thank you
for the story of the way you and our grandfather

met. For the story of how his parents
were just country farming folk, never sent him
in to school, and the system found him,
third-grade age, and brought him in, and showed him
the third grade classroom, and said, you could
go here if you wanted, these children are
your age. Showed him the second grade classroom
and said, this is right in the middle, if
you like, showed him the first grade class
and said this is the beginning. What do you think?
And my grandfather, the love of your whole life,
just a boy, looked up, smiling, and said:
What classroom was the black-haired girl in?
Of course she was you. This story gave me
permission to believe in love. Do you see

the trend, Gin? O woman who refused to be called
Grandmother because of what it might imply,
woman who threw respect to the wind and said
instead we should call you by your nickname,
Gin, from Virginia, the name I now bear in honor
of all your stories, thank you for what
your stories teach me and thank you, even,

for the story I hate to tell, the story
my father told me, the story in which it is
late September, 1957, and my father is watching
you do the dishes, happy in the kitchen of
his childhood home, happy in the way that only
a privileged white boy in Arkansas in the 50s
can be as he watches his beautiful mother
do dishes, smiling, in the home his father,
who loves his mother, built for his family,
whom he also loves, and shows it. In this story
you are elbow deep in suds when the trucks go past,
down the highway which runs right in front
of your house, and you look up, and you see
the line, as dark green as they tell me
your eyes must have been, and you throw

down your dishtowel and you run out into
your front yard to shake your fist and scream,
as if it were anything other than ineffectual,
at the 101st Airborne on their way
to do nothing other than help a few kids
go to school. Thank you for what I've learned
from this story too, that even gods
and goddesses can be wrong, that it is
my destiny to learn from my heritage,
that my shame is my teacher, that I
can be like you and different at once,
that I can be lady-like, beautiful,
well-traveled, deserve nice things and
deserve to be loved but that I
should love others, too.

Sleep well,
your loving granddaughter.