Every Sunday afternoon, she would listen to the Metropolitan Opera live. Sprawled across the living room rug, she craved the vibrations of the songs in her teeth, the way they burrowed to the back of her brain. She dreamed of becoming an opera singer. She perfumed herself with arias and cadenzas. Hummed Sempre libera in the kitchen until she boarded it up. For the rest of her life, she ate like a bird.

Tonight, a tarot reader I follow on YouTube speaks of Deer Spirit, how this spirit is with me. I wonder if this spirit belongs to the 12-Point buck we hit on a paved road many towns ago, that night you picked me up from Gram’s apartment, because now I feel you everywhere.

Cousin, you with the tapered waist, long legs, flat stomach, the envy of my youth. All the genes that had done me dirty came out to look good on you. Until you opened your mouth and then it sounded just as if you had marshmallows jammed up your nose. Your voice, always, even when you were screaming sounding like a snuffed fire. We were thirteen.

It feels salient to stay soft these days.

I cower in the bathtub and have the end-of-bath, perimenopausal (won’t/can’t-make-it-to-the-toilet) pee. It’s pink, then red, then little, fleshy pieces ranging from liver to strawberry flow out of me and settle, like sediment, at the bottom of the bath. When I stir, they do, a bit like an algae bloom.

Menopause. My woolly mouth is also sour, tannic. My stomach is filled with mud water, like the slip used in a pottery studio. My body is transforming. Again.

When I was pregnant with my son, I vomited water, then bile. I couldn’t walk in a straight line.

I have two families, and they are both real. 

The family with my earlobes and dimples loved me before I did one noble deed. They are a marinara river that runs from Sicily through Brooklyn and pools in Pennsylvania suburbs. They have mandolins and MBAs and use a separate spoon for my sauce, since it looks like this whole vegetarian thing is not just a phase after all.