In a house under the bangs of a neighborhood under a thumb of pooling sky — look, I live there, the house with the lawn that stings and sticks out like an angry brown thumb, with the dead rosebushes and thorny mess, convoluted cars and shower-curtain Christmas lights bordered all around the gutters even though it's May? — That house, there, the one where if you open up the door, you'll find musty smell and cream-stain walls, cat hair all around the floor and a lonely dining room, where a thoroughly-aged woman has set her knitting aside and taken up a three-pronged fork, drowsy and hungry?
       
You'll see me, across from her, and know that if you darted down the hall you'd find a small festooned room, like a ruined and sinking ship; an empty guitar, an un-entertained television, lopsided papers scattered around, and a clean corner with a box no one touches, my Pandora's box, one where, if opened, all of my guts would spill out onto the floor and you'd be stuck, scattered, in a sticky mess of doubt and unheld hands and doors without signs and a litter of childhood memories entwined with adult feelings, dots you don't want to connect.
       
It's a house in a dead neighborhood in a world that rotates after you die, in a work full of leukemics and anorexics, cancer patients and drug addicts, stillbirths and miscarriages, in a world full of people who hate their bodies and whose bodies hate them — I hate change, by the way.
       
                                                                   -
       
I have these dreams, sometimes, that consist of a man, talking to me in hushed, scared, whimpering tones, like a dog with the barrel pointed at his hickory nose. What do you do, then, when he's asking you to admit it, when he's asking you to be human, when he's tall and looking like a clear underdog, when it's like you're some rich man who won't give up his money to dying children, when he's taking to you like you're at the end of your line, asking questions about bad sides and plastered faces? What do you do, then?
       
My father died when I was about fifteen, with jelly-knuckles and scardey-cat eyes, legs like cracked stone. He died like a man should've, with hairy arms and a handful of moustache hair and two testicles.
       
Yes, two testicles, because the man went and got himself testicular cancer, sent my mom and I through relapses between chemo-smelling mornings and dreamy afternoons where he would wilt in the easy-chair and make me, force me to pray that he'd wake up again, and then finally, when they said they'd have to chop his balls off to rid him of the cancer, he shook his head and said "there must be something else you can do."
       
Now, sit, for a second, and imagine what it's like to have a dad with cancer — of the testicles. Imagine the embarrassment and imagine the pain. Close your eyes, your lids like lusterless coins, close them tight and try to picture it. Most people who have family going through cancer or something so mind-boggling and medicine-defying as that wear it like a badge, like this makes them survivors through their family members, like they want you to sit and imagine the hardships they must be braving, like they want you to understand that it happens all over the place, that they want you to be amazed at just how close they got to it.
       
Breast cancer isn't embarrassing. Breast cancer is for strong, tough women who walk miles in the shoes of people who are desperately grasping at money-colored straws to understand what they're going through, breast cancer is for women who are full-figured and pleasant and have shaded eyes and big arms, carry themselves with pride, breast cancer women have dangled their feet over the edge, you respect breast cancer women.
       
And then there's lung cancer, to name another. Lung cancer is more of a reprimand, if it's gotten through nicotine, which is likely. See a teen with low-cut jeans and a too-long shirt with a cancer stick popped out of his mouth like wayward tinsel on a Christmas tree and you think, "This boy could use some learnin'," and you walk over with your holier-than-thou attitude and explain the dangers, you dare him to look you in the eye and say cancer isn't real, so you can whip out your grandmother or your father or your sibling or your cousin who fought and maybe even lost to lung cancer, you make it so real in his face that you beam like Pinocchio who has found real flesh.
       
How does that make you feel, sweeties, honeys, darlings? How does it make you feel to recount obituaries with a smile lurking in your heart — pass it off as grief or relief that they survived, but you don't wear cancer, you support its research and pity the ones who are rushed to the ER, their lives and deaths aren't your examples, okay?
       
Let's imagine testicular cancer, for a second. People will try to mask their giggles behind unclothed teeth, try to put things between their sniggers and their bodies, like maybe you could play the sound off on the wind or the squeak of tennis shoes. Sometimes, they'll even make jokes, behind open mouths to their friends, giggling about half-men and balls, like it would've been tragic if it had been brain cancer, leg cancer, anything-else cancer, cancer of the earlobe for chrissake.
       
My father, who would not go down like a sissy, like a wuss, who wouldn't have the coroner look down on his dying-day and realize that his penis hang loose and undecorated, like maybe his coroner would actually giggle himself — my father, who died for his masculinity, who held onto it until it took him down.
       
He talked to me about dying, before he left, before he went — goddammit, before he died, I can say it. He said, "I think death, I think it's going to be like a football game," and I breathe-laughed and he couldn't stop himself from explaining, twitchy eyes and mouth, "you know, with some people trying to make a living, and all of these ghosts outside, watching them, laughing and yelling and cheering and booing them on. You know?"
       
A man's man, I'm sure, a man of a man of a man of a man, a man with no mother he was so manly.
       
He isn't — wasn't, always. He coos at little kids, pets puppies when you aren't looking, probably shits beauty. Behind all his trophies is a picture of Mom, in one of her good sundresses, with the sunset at her back and Mexico on her heels, something pretty and touching. Sometimes I wonder if I'm the only one who's seen him cry (after Uncle Lenny's funeral, nineteen-ninety-four, who choked on a sandwich while having a seizure, bits of meat touched around the elbows, like God placed them there, gently.)
       
In my dreams, he asks me, "Do you fear death, kid," and looks me in his eyes, and inside of them I can see all sorts of things I'd never want to see again, like mutilated cotton balls shaped like testicles, like a mouth shoved full of darts, like my mother, when she fell over his limp body in rage at a power that will never understand us, and he doesn't wait for my answer before he leaves.
       
Once, he's said, "You're like me, girl, you are," but he wasn't talking about hair color or our fisted eye-sockets or our cynicism or our stubbornness, all he means by that is that I would die for things to be the same, for men to be men and women to be women, men who don't cry and women who don't fix cars, shaving cream and separate bathrooms and private parts and all.
       
And oh, we all have our private parts.
       
                                                                   -
       
At that table I brought you to — remember, the one on the dejected street with the mismatch lawn? — we should take a closer look at the way it's set.
       
It's a small table, by the way, shock-handled and a pale color of wood, almost albino. There are two plates, sitting criss-cross-applesauce from each other, one laden with food like spillage and gore, gut-like beans and tissue macaroni, smashed-eye socket potatoes and fracture pieces of turkey, like a dump. The other plate is scarcely populated, an abandoned city, with little cyclops beans and no turkey in sight.
       
Do you think I eat a lot? Do you think I'm skinny? You're reading this, you've made judgments, probably, more than you might even realize you're making, in the colors behind your eyelids and the curtain in your brain. If you agree with me, if you're sitting there thinking, "This person makes sense," I bet you picture me flattering, I bet I have pretty brunette hair in your dreams and I bet I'm of a slightly-tall height, I bet you picture bright green eyes and thin arms. Is that it? What if you think I'm full of shit? Are my arms big now, flabby? Is my pretty brunette hair stock-straight and greasy, ugly, discolored and tiled? Do I look squashier — am I flabby? What happened to those eyes, honey, are they shit-black now, like the heart I might not, must not have?
       
What if I told you that thinly-dressed plate is mine, only because I ate it quickly? Because I don't like to savor things, because I was so ready to shove it down my throat, to get my fix, to get my intestines full? What if I told you that I'm a binge-eater and I just shoved it all down, and as you're staring at that plate now, I'm reaching for thirds, fourths? What if I told you that I'm so overweight I can't see my feet, what if I told you that my hair is actually blond, that I have four or five chins, that my eyes are gray and my arms are thick with skin and anger and fearless fear, a fear that is so unweighted that it lays on me like sweat?
       
Do you think you know me? Do you think you know me from my plate, from my table, from my neighborhood, from my manly father and my mother who can't meet my eyes? Do you?
       
...You could, you know, if you wanted to.
       
                                                                   -
       
When I was young, my favorite toy was this Barbie doll. She had a baby-face, you know, and those pencil thighs, and big baby-making hips, and eyes like circular rings of blue. She had black dots on the middles of her breasts, a feature added on by a perverted neighborhood boy who caught me playing with her in the dirt by the dead rosebushes in the front yard. Her neck was long and curved, and I wanted to draw princess-collarbones on the wrists of her shoulders, I wanted to turn her into a beauty queen, because there was something so unattractive about the load of her pleasant good-looking features.
       
I loved her hair, though, her hair was pleated yellow and bouncy, like she had spent days in New York to perfect that sort of volume, you know, the form they talk about in shampoo commercials where they pay ridiculous amounts of digital attention to the shine and texture, with ridiculous names that involve loads of "pluses" and "renewals" and "texturizing" and fake-science?
       
I wanted her hair. I wanted to feel it resting on my lower spine, I wanted to see it in my shadow like a badger-shaped wig piled on my head, I wanted to feel it straighten and wilt on my back in the shower, God I wanted it so badly.
       
I cut her hair, once, short, so it no longer hung down like Rapzunel's residue. It didn't dangle down onto the middle of her back anymore, now it rested just in-between her neck and her earlobes. I was seven or eight, and I took all those snowflake shards of blond thread and piled them on top of my hair, weaved them into my roots, held them around where my hair parted, closed my eyes and pretended I had slick cherry lips like she did, big sea eyes, the sort of youthfulness a Botox-addict would kill for.
       
That's what we're good at, right, playing pretend? That's acceptable, right, at seven or eight?
       
What if I told you I was fourteen, and what if I told you that I had abused my Barbie doll, what if I told you half of her hand was curdled and what if I told you that place on her breasts where the pen-dimple is I burned, with matches I stole from my dad's study, amidst his camping gear? What if I told you I ran my hands under hot water afterwards, at first just to get all the loose pieces of hair off my fingers, and then until I couldn't feel the nerves anymore?
       
What if I told you I felt dangerous? What if I told you I felt beautiful when it happened, every second?
       
I call her Chemo Barbie, now, because I can run my fingers through her wrinkly hair, over her crystal eyes, and it'll shed, make a small rainstorm on the floor, created by the friction in my fingernails and the crack of my knuckles. Run my fingers through the silver-yellow hair, like the lights under the crevice of a dark door, and it all empties into the palm of my hand.
       
Her hair is above her ears, now, and after my father went through chemo, I couldn't bring myself to look her in the glazed-over eyes. I tucked my Barbie doll away in a box in the corner of my room, and I don't dare look at her, for fear of what I'll have to relive and for fear of what she'll see in me.
       
Sometimes, you don't change things, you take what's precious until there's nothing left to give, and you let them weep where you don't have to see anymore. I don't know that doll, I stuck her in scenarios she didn't belong in and I took her hair away from her, that's all, that's all.
       
                                                                   -
       
Maybe you're the observant type, and maybe you noticed that I described our plates and not the rest of the table, huh? Are you that person? I won't assume, promise.
       
Let's look at the other sides, the sides that don't contain the plates — assorted mail, a few thank-you cards, a discarded catalog advertising Christmas presents we could've bought all of our family members who don't know where we are, who we are, who don't remember how we're related or what our last names are. The mail is mostly from credit card companies who want us to buy their newest installment, electricity and water bills (from all those late nights spent crying, hot showers and warm television sitcoms, cold ice cream spilling into my lap — still think I'm a binge-eater, still think I have perfect arms?), and miscellaneous Christmas and New Years cards that never got opened. When Mom's not working she's knitting, and when I'm not sleeping I'm hiding.
       
We have small amounts of silverware; the uneaten and inedible plate has a knife, a fork, a spoon and a napkin, prepared to swallow and tuck in everything and anything that might rest in front of it; the other plate has only a fork, which, caught in the right light, shines like someone might've taken care of it, and out of the light, looks like something an abused orphan uses to spoon his oatmeal.
       
And next to this, all of this light and silver and postcard-delight garbage, wish-you-were-here and why-don't-you-have-this, next to all of these are these erect, classy blue glasses.
       
If I could, I'd throw open the cabinets and trash every one of them, toss them to the ground and set them all on fire and sprinkle them with gasoline and just see what happens, throw them off the sides of television-screen boats like they were the ashes of someone fervently disliked, desecrate the graves of their makers. If the Devil, in all his horned and cloved glory, drinks his red wine out of blue glasses, then he's missing a set.
       
They are beautiful, perfect glasses. I hate each and every one, down to the residual liquid at the bottom of their throats and all the way up to their pretty blue-toenail rims.
       
                                                                   -
       
I used to be ashamed of my front lawn. Let me describe it for you — it's a gardener's worst nightmare, one of those really enthusiastic gardeners, who sleeps with shears and clippers under their pillows and a potted plant growing on their nightstand. It's messy, it's ruined, it's something out of a Salvador Dali painting.
       
The dirt is surreal and rustic, a sort of powdery, dry dirt, something no plant should ever have to go through being born in. Dear Lord I pitied those rosebushes, all thorns and rings, tiny little dejected white and pink petals all around, like a sunset that was chopped into bite-size bits. Rocks everywhere, too, strewn about the place like an earthquake had popped them all into its mouth and ruptured them back up.
       
Doesn't that sound beautiful, though? A sunset you can chew, a sunset that lays on the ground? Rocks that have been swallowed by the earth, dirt like a fine puce powder? There's beauty in that yard, all over the place, strewn about and over all of the crap in it, all of the shit, you just have to look closely to see it. I have this theory, you know, that beauty is like ghosts and clear teeth: transparent. But if you look close enough, if you get real personal, you can find the substance.
       
I'm not so religious, but I like to think God made this yard, that God wanted it this way. That God peered down at this scenic neighborhood and noticed how every house had a prim and trim green lawn, like little square jigsaw pieces, flushed green with dappled brown around the edges — and stuck my hexagonal, brown, smelly and always-dry yard in the middle of it all, with weeds that maybe look like grass if you squint.
       
I was pushed into the rocks, once — there are rocks, acting as the left slice of bread between the dirt and the sidewalk — by these boys who lived down the block. They had angry-skater hats and eyes as dark as their hair. There's a lot of craft in their bedhead and a lot of pain worked into those natural scowls, you can see it.
       
One of their skateboards has gone missing and they've decided it's me, it's my mouth and my legs, it's my snatchy fingers and my webbed thoughts, I've got their skateboard hidden in my closet at home, that's what they tell me as their arms connect with my torso, that's their justification for giving me a small gash in the back of the head and a stiff neck, that's what the twisted minds of two teenage boys can produce when without their skateboard.
       
The sky looks larger when you're looking up at it, which is why I'll never understand stargazers — who wants to be so overwhelmed all the time by the puffball clouds that calculate and swarm above your head like slow-moving bees, who wants to be below that huge expanse of blue, so big it's going to swallow you up?
       
So I squint and look down, on my side, look at the rocks and the dirt and the color of cement, and when I squint harder, suddenly it's my best friend, and as I raise myself on knees that bruise blue and red too easily, the beauty is evident, everywhere, painted on my elbows and in the small spots of blood I've left on purple sunbleached rocks.
       
But when I go back outside, with four new band-aids and an excuse for the gash (bicycles are dangerous, after all, as any parent is so willing to believe), the dirt clings to my shoes, the petals look moldier than before, squinting doesn't do anything at all for my vision, and I'm ashamed and red-embarrassed all over again. God must be cross-eyed and tired.
       
                                                                   -
       
You have to picture these glasses; you have to see them imprinted on the roof of your brain, like Braille and cathedral art. Can you smell it, can you smell these blue-touched glasses, full to the rim with fake chocolate milk and stiff pale beer, can you smell the alcoholism and the death from here?
       
My insane grandmother gave these to us. Since she's gone demented and addicted, she's got piles of money sitting around, spent only on a lonely green-wearing nurse who feeds her and gives her the right pills and hides the alcohol in inventive places. She sends me jewelry, often, jewelry I look at once or twice before tucking away somewhere near Chemo Barbie, who hasn't seen daylight since the day the floor wore her hair like prom night wears tissue paper.
       
My father would've hated these glasses. He would've shunned them, said they were feminine, maybe done what I don't have the guts to do and burn them until there's nothing left, until you can't see the tufts of his hair mixed in with beach-blond Chemo Barbie's, my yard littered with tumors, growing out of the walls, infecting all of us.
       
I want to smash these, these beautiful glasses, these proud and tall glasses, like they have nothing, unafraid to show their insides, squint as hard as you like but there's no beauty to be found in these classy and these animated containers, lacey and cold death from a woman who's screwed with dying for sixty years now.
       
I know I'll never break, rip, tear through those glasses like silk and butterfly wings, because I don't like change.
       
So leave this neighborhood, stranger, because I don't know you, and you don't know me, you haven't even scratched the surface of my existence, you could never claim to know anything about me, about who I am, about the beauty that swarms around me like a thin mist and the way I've constructed my life, my person. No, you don't know me at all. If you look past your olive lawns and cancer wristbands, my empty plate and the size of my arms, you still won't know me and this dirty little private part I call a life.
       
So leave and never whisper, never dream of me and my father and my mother, never think about us in this giggle and snort of a home.

Now open your eyes, take my anorexic plate to the sink, stay out of my room and out of Chemo Barbie's fragmented hair, and don't step on my goddamn weeds on the way out.