roots
I am everyone I've ever loved.
I am the way my grandfather cuts peaches
slowly,
at nighttime, with a dull paring knife.
I laugh exactly the same way as my mother,
and I have a gap-tooth that's been passed down generations.
But I am also everyone I've ever hated.
I yell, and slam kitchen drawers like my stepdad,
and I smoke like him too.
I have my mother’s strength,
but I have my father’s inability to say no to the things that would eventually destroy him.
I am the ripe proof of my lineage’s most sickly sins,
and their most treasured heirlooms.
Lucia Angileri is an emerging writer from Windsor, Ontario Canada. She is currently working away at her first collection of poetry, titled A General Distaste For Humanity, and her work has been published in an issue of Papers Publishing. IG: @macabre._musings @lucia.angileri