My mother was
a first generation lesbian.
My father,
a first generation divorcee.
His father was the one child
of a public school teacher.
He found my grandmother at 18.
A farm child, one of seven.
A painter, a baker.
My mother's father
a single boy to three sisters.
His aggressive masculinity
kept the line clear and thick.
He found my mother's mother at 17.
A middle of seven Pentecostal children.
A beauty queen, an agoraphobic.
Each had five children.
The door-to-door salesmen/
homemaker and mother of boys duo
bet it all to open a hobby shop.
They were by far the poorest of the
watermelon farming siblings.
They were artists and explorers.
The high school graduate and ladies man,
was a logger before a father.
And the single mother of 25 he left
scarcely left her home at all.
Neither pair made it big.
But they made my father.
A lonely, post middle aged man.
The poorest of his brothers.
A used to be pilot,
and could have been teacher,
a want to be pioneer.
A nuclear family super fan
who never got his way.
And they made my mother.
A nervous, eccentric hippie
who doesn't know how to talk to her siblings.
A woman working her *** off to excel at lower middle class.
A builder, a fighter, a **** good mother.
Even if accidentally so.
She has plans to travel.
He has dreams to live by a lake.
And they made me.
A single girl among three boys.
A quirky, nervous tomboy.
A thinker, a gardener, a climber.
A loser and a dreamer by blood.