Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

Growing up, I was that kid who put off going straight home after school. When Saint Elizabeth’s elementary school day ended, I went to the Cecil B. Moore Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia. It’s still there; I recently drove by, and it seems so tiny after all these years.

Back then, I loved the airiness, the formality and orderliness of the space, so different from my home. A tiled mosaic greeted everyone who walked through its glass doors. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can smell the books, see the wooden carrels, and card catalog files, and, of course, recall the kind librarians who sat as if on thrones behind the circulation desk. I can see schoolmates with older siblings doing homework together, head to head.

I delayed going home because my parents argued and yelled and sometimes, became physical. Those days of shouting shaped me, as did my neighborhood where conflict was settled violently. Often some family members were at the center of it, which pushed me in the other direction, to be quiet and non-confrontational. I could not have felt any more different from my immediate and extended family.

But, we were family, still, and were inclined to protect and look out for each other, which I appreciated. I was a target for anyone who wanted to find someone to bully, I needed their protection. They knew my whereabouts, and kept me safe. But, they mostly left me alone, except occasionally to tease me out of my perpetual seriousness. If my parents required my presence, they knew they could find me at the library. I appreciate that they understood my need for space and gave me a wide berth of both freedom and safeguarding.

Today’s poem finds that same grace in the balance of distance and closeness between ourselves and those who made us.

Liturgy for Family Circles
by Joanna Currey

Hallelujah for the opera
of an onion—silk and crunch, tear-jerk bulb.

Mom worries about the ways I hurt myself, my stoic
approach to grief. She stops me, chops it herself, gratified

by my watering eyes, small facades of vulnerability. Hallelujah for the cigarette
I don’t want, given by my little brother. I worry about the ways he hurts himself.

I’m gratified by five minutes on the deck standing
close and don’t admit I like him better when he’s high.

Hallelujah for the times he’s sober and unkind. I
think it’s his fault I like my boys saturnine—Adj:

Mysterious. Moody. Gloomy. Orbiting their ontology like clockwork,
like Saturn’s moon-shatter rings. Hallelujah for the teeth that jewel

my baby sisters’ mouths, sharp and clean, that cut into a cold plum
without fussing about the poetics of it. Hallelujah again for the onion

my mother loves on everything, each layer a watery halo
in her assured hands. Hallelujah for friends who understand me, who cut cheap

gin but pool their cash for a bottle of fruity blue Hpnotiq
just because it’s beautiful. I want it all holy—cutting my own hair—

every imprecise and lonely sacrament of dailiness.
And every sharp word. And every fresh cut.

Oh little brother, how long since you
let me cut yours? Autumn, and I rev

the engine of my heart when you teach me to chop wood. Now 
do you see me? Blazing in the moment after I almost ax

my toes, the cardiac jolt of near miss that makes me cry Holy—
while you just stand, golden in the slant of afternoon sun, sweaty head haloed with frizz.

“Liturgy for Family Circles” by Joanna Currey. Originally published in The Boiler. Used by permission of the poet.