The gas station attendant asked
How is a pretty girl like you not already married
I answered that it must be because of my temper or my hairy legs
or because of bulging variscosities
from oxygen-starved years of smoking cigarettes, being pregnant, working for hours on my feet and bad genes
But I want to go deeper
without ever having to mention my most immediate family
because even I am superstitious
though I trust the universe with my whole being

It could be because of my communist grandfather
who built all the roads in Idaho and Washington
before spending sleepless winters on the muddy floor of the tent
he shared with his Catholic wife and four children
because no one would hire him and
then he molested his eldest daughter
decades before propositioning my best friend

It could have been my other grandmother who put her freckle-faced red-haired toddler step-daughter into a box
in the fire place for too long before her grandmother pulled her out
and carefully dressed her excruciating melted body for months after while
the girl’s American Indian logger father who
may have been a Bella Bella a Tillamook an Umpqua or
a Puget Sound Salish Nisqually, Muckleshoot or
a Straits Salish, Lummi or Sooke
though he never talked about his people before nor after
he took the fall for his wife
who also put the girl who would one day be my mother
into a phone booth night after night to wait
while she danced for sailors coming back to shore after the war

Or it might be because of my falling out teeth
with tarnished fillings turning to acrid reminders of too much sweet junk
poisoning childrens’ bodies and
silver and gold mined from far away beautiful lands
like Salgado’s Brazil
or Mandela’s South Africa
where mammoth pits clawed and ravaged by years of betrayal
no longer resemble what any creator deemed
only cheek checks with rifle butts
where explosions routinely bury the living and
death is simply collateral
to ensure the sparkling twinkle of a gem’s set
on a single finger

So tell me
in the midst of madness
when violence against a baby’s tender flesh is even remotely possible
by mothers and fathers
in the presence of such things as great love and art
when my guilt is not penance enough for this weight
can you ask me a different question?