Jeep's US Marine Corps Graduation.

Someone took my little brother and dressed him up in a man uniform.



It is all very bittersweet.

I'm going to say it...

Florence + The Machine's 'Lungs' is this year's best album. I realize it's not even September so this may be premature. I'm willing to risk it because this is all sorts of awesome. I've listened to it my car for 2+ weeks straight. I thought An Horse's 'Rearrange Beds' couldn't be knocked down on my list but there is something about this album that just wins. Hands down. Buy it. Please.

Interesting.

amateur night in Abbyville.

A Girl of Twenty-four.

This one time in the 80's, some tiny red-headed woman birthed me. I was round. Always round. Fed my mother's milk to the age of two. She tells me stories of how I would hold my breath, just waiting for her to react. The slant of a concerned eye, the rise of a brow, only then would I inhale.

When I was four, we lived in low-income housing. The air now smells like absent fathers and cheap beer. I have learned to keep holding my breath. Sitting on a tire swing in my lilac colored sweat-shirt that showed my belly button. Rainbow colored sandals and all. The watchman.

Then I was ten, just a boy with a bowl cut. I watched a lot of football with my father. I was just waiting for someone to remind me of my hips and breasts. The hidden me behind the oversized t-shirts and Nikes. And they did. I learned the sting of being made to feel less than, small, too big, not enough.

I found them myself. Those breasts, those hips. I am unmistakable. I became a nearly six foot fifteen-year-old with body to spare. I had yet to figure out how to know it, how to own it. I was just trying to stay afloat.

I was 18 when my grandmother died. She told me I was beautiful and left me. The ovaries that created my father only to have created me, they had failed her. They had failed me. I want to know women. I want to be mothered. I locked myself in a room with Ani, Sylvia, Kathleen...I was almost there. I was...learning to be it.

I am it. I am a girl of twenty-four. I am tasting it. I am swinging, belly out. I am a boy with a bowl cut. I am thighs and long limbs and brains. I am my grandmother. I am breathing in.

August 2, 2009