I spread my drawings across the kitchen floor,
aquarium blueprints unfurling like small
hopes, while my father stands
in the doorway, fragile as blown glass.
In drama club, they hand me a slip of paper:
frying bacon, a joke about the way
I twist my bangs with sculpting gel,
the way I’ve learned to frame my face
without her. My father says, I’ve found
another girl in the same boat as you,
as if we are two strips of meat thrown
in the same hot pan, sizzling. I lie
on the cold floor, body klump-klumping
against linoleum while they watch me
fail to become anything other than myself.
Electrocution? someone guesses.
A dead fish? another calls out, and I think
of her, gone as suddenly as that.
I learn how to curl up small at home,
how to make sure he doesn’t topple,
saying, Okay, Dad, while inside I crackle
and spit. The day she left I watched him
fold over the kitchen table, body shriveling
in the heat of her absence. Later, I drew
belugas on newsprint, bodies
suspended in imaginary water,
navigating by sound, unable to see
beyond the next cold current.
In drama club, I learn that becoming
something else requires every atom
of your being. At home, I’m already everything:
daughter, caretaker, bacon and pan.
Improv
DJ Lee’s nonfiction essays and poetry have appeared in Narrative, Silk Road Review, Terrain, and elsewhere, and they have been finalists for contests and won awards. She is author/editor of eight books, both scholarly and creative, on literature, history, and the environment, including the oral history collection The Land Speaks (Oxford 2017), and a lyric memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots (Oregon State 2020). She is Regents Professor at Washington State University where she teaches literature and creative writing.