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My family’s experience isn’t fodder

for artwork, says Nature in btwn make outs

But you’ll drink yourself to sleep?

Who is the “I” but its inheritances—Let’s play a game

Let’s say Southern California’s water is oil

Let’s say Halliburton is the San Diego Flume Company

and I am descended from a long line of wildfires

I mean tribal leaders

The Cuyamaca Flume transported mountain runoff and river water into the heart of San Diego. Construction began illegally, in secret, in the 1880s. The creek bed dried. The plants died. The very best citizens of San Diego called it “deluded sentimentality” to give Indians any land or water. As if these are things, stuff to be owned or sold off

I am missing many cousins, have you seen them?

The important thing, I suppose, is that this weekend was the first one we spent that wasn’t entirely at the state fair or big-brother Disneyland. It was the first time Daddy sort of ignored me like the Doctor, and I must confess that I had a better time than ever before on these custody junkets. It’s heavy pressure, you know, to find your role four days out of the month, a little two-day run every two weeks with no rehearsal. I suppose it was no fun for him, either, being the director as well as actor and still not getting it right. But that weekend he seemed a lot more regular in a way it’s hard to describe. I think that woman (Mike’s mother) looked sexy, for one thing, but that is strictly my unhaired opinion. At school the word is, you don’t know what girls really are until you have hair, kind of a Samson thing, I guess.

One night during this time my mother started asking me questions, out of the blue, about William Faulkner. She was taking a night-school course and wanted to write about the Nobel laureate from her hometown, New Albany. Why Faulkner, I asked, of all the writers in the world to care about? Why not Richard Wright, James Baldwin or Zora Neale Hurston? “We’re kin to some Faulkners,” she said. I laughed out loud and informed her that this Faulkner was white. My mother smiled and said, “So?”

THOUGHT #3

Tyler Perry knows how to bring everything together wit all the stories? And all the singing? And all the different people talking?

THOUGHT #1

And Tyler Perry don’t never forget to bring in the spirit’ch’alities.

THOUGHT #2

‘Cause Tyler Perry loves his Mama—

THOUGHT #6

And the Lord—

THOUGHT #1

So write a nice, clean Tyler Perry-like gospel play for your parents please?

Hours later, Temperance is leading a “Mommyhood: The Christian Way” workshop for unwed mothers. She takes deep breaths, still trying to channel her mother’s certitude that this child was meant to be, ordained. The mothers around her are lollipop young, mainly from the projects, and chockablock with children. She can almost look at them now and not hurt. Before, her ovaries would ache just to be in this room with so many women who seemed to get pregnant if you so much as blew on them. Shanice begat Shanice Jr. begat Lativia begat LaRenée begat Jamelia begat Jameka. Begat, begetting, begotten.

Temperance had shared these thorny thoughts with Andrew once—confession, allegedly good for the soul and all. She had whispered that night, but her grievances somehow echoed in the cloistered silence of their bedroom. Why, Andrew, why? Why would God bless them and not her? Hadn’t she done everything right, everything expected? Waited to get her JD, her MRS. Why was she still waiting on her happily ever after? Andrew knuckled tears from her cheeks, his eyes filled with such tender disappointment, as he reminded her she was better than that, a woman of God—above such pretty, elitist notions. She bowed her head then. She listened as he prayed.

But sometimes, Lord. Sometimes.

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

The worldess white stone of my life!