I’m molding into a storyteller with age,

but not without listening to how my mother

watched the world shift and write chapters.

She was working in an office for BellSouth,

praying after the Challenger incident;

home, hearing what they found

under Gacy’s house; raising

me while I was too young to know what

was happening in Waco,

or Oklahoma,

or other places that took over the 90’s.

​

She can,

I can’t remember many events without

iPhones and constant coverage to flood us

with the new panic before we could digest the last.

Emotions seemed much more innocent,

too raw before millennial buzz gave us

numb stares, attention deficits.

It was life like the way her father, a farmer dressed

in rough hands and a stoic mouth, told her

the gravity of Kennedy with tears.

​

Generations after the last seem to start

all over again. Decades later, I was in school

in September, alerted by stern voices

and breaking news on every channel.

​

Like her,

I was young—“What’s a terrorist attack?”

and other questions.

Like her,

I wasn’t pushed into a new era

until I found her clutching Kleenex

in the living room.

Like her,

I’m a wide-eyed witness, doomed to

pass around vivid images when wisdom sets.

Because we became lost teens of the storm, assigned

to the refrigerator with garbage bags and bleach

amid power outages and school closures

after Hurricane Katrina, we learned to shrug early

as the city went through its own awkward stage.

We had to cancel date night plans again,

but we fill a grocery basket with

canned goods,

Kleenex,

the last bread on the shelf

in silence. We talk about the smell

of Lenten catfish in the backseat

on the way to quarantine.

Children of the 90’s, we go there

when we want to remember optimism.

This is why, with a laptop between us,

I reminisce to Britney Spears

being my first CD,

wipe the dust off the guitar

in Tool’s Track #1,

listen to the first songs by Outcast,

those one- hit wonders we neglect.

I explain how “Closing Time” was a metaphor

for parenthood. We shift to “Starman” and earlier

decades when you confess to never watching

“Saturday Night Fever.” We listen beyond the upbeat

Voice in “Semi-Charmed Life,” really pay attention.

In the present tense, there’s a band I went to see

At a bar last weekend.

The facts are,

Grateful Dead’s drummer plays alongside

Papa Mali and this won’t be the last time we will

fall asleep to trivia,

slow dance rhythms,

whisky heavy lyrics

in “King Cotton Blues.” Tomorrow, we can shrug

and do this again to keep the romance.

As music goes on, so does the world.

As a little girl,

she hated the season

between October and February,

when uncles came to surround

the pig in her father’s pen.

​

This was how la boucherie started:

​

She would close the closet door

behind her, press her palms

into her ears just as the high-pitched

squeals pierced the men’s exhaled air.

​

When her ears burned, and tears escaped

the pressure—that’s how she knew

they were draining life into a bucket.

​

Under the supervision

of loud Creole tongues, nothing went

to waste: bacon for breakfast,

pork chops for dinner,

ham for Christmas.

She grew older, couldn’t believe

the meat soaked inside the boiled blood,

lining up for a taste of the lips and brain.

​

Over Christmas coffee,

she tells her youngest daughter

every bloody detail.

​

These days,

she hates the taste of pork.

​

Now the next generation gets it.