I count five off the list but of course 

there are others, unlisted. The full ten 

an artifact from a health outcomes

survey, done in San Diego.

 

Four or more greatly increases one’s risk of some cancers,

chronic pulmonary lung disease, depression, suicide.

 

What have they given me and what

have they taken? 

 

No one really knows if cancer was allowed 

to flourish because ACEs shut 

cancer-fighting cells off

 

or if they sped up my cells’ aging so that my birth age

is less than my cellular age

 

but my fear of dire consequences and sense

of unloveableness are probably dead ringers

 

No. 1

 

My father’s humiliation–calling me unkempt,

apologizing to strangers for my knotted hair,

decreeing me “not dressed nice enough” for the church supper

 

No. 4

 

The flashes of my mother’s anger–how I hid in the stem

of the dining room table, waiting for it to be over. 

​

And then my aftermath-response–

I didn’t ask to be born, followed by her

Why are you torturing me?

 

My father’s refusal to take me in

when DSS was investigating my mother

You can go live with Uncle Paul--

you won’t be out on the street. 

Oblique attempts to comfort.

 

No. 5

 

It wasn’t days-on-days of hungry–more a day here and there.

Not Richard Wright’s cups of tea instead of food

but an oftenness of not enough food. 

Then, in 5th grade, the terrible diet where you could only eat

one food per meal–like onions or potatoes.

Getting it wrong or breaking it and endlessly starting

the month-long diet over. 

 

The news article my mother taped on the kitchen wall

about the woman accused of starving her intellectually delayed daughter--

my mother thought it was funny that my father thought

she was starving me. But I knew he would never

come inside and see the news clip. A house

defined by his absence. And hunger’s humorlessness.

 

No. 6

 

A custody battle that my father

waged but didn’t want to win. A psychiatrist

arguing for me to stay with my mother.

A sense of my father’s fatherliness as a blank,

almost a window you could see through.

The minutiae that were fought over including

whose church I should go to

until my mother was arrested for trespassing at hers 

and I defected to his.

You don’t know how hard I fought in court, she said.

A sense of myself as traitor to one side or the other.

​

No. 9

 

My mother’s head so often in her hands I want to intervene now

whenever I see someone in that posture. My student, a friend once

when she was tired. The fears–of not being able to get out of bed,

of being laid off for slowness, of putting off job or housing applications

for months while I work up to them. Her conviction that people were stealing

our bank passbooks to get private information,

that police plotted to rape me so they could show she was selling me.

 

That dismal house a bastion of safety–how, by staying in it

you could ward everything off. The magic of

a house that could barely hold itself up protecting us.