Crematorium

Shelby Nine, “Pandemic Pressure”

by Jamie McErlean

With the crushing weight of a family name and all their

money on her back, my mom birthed me with frail legs

too weak for a bright childhood of running and playing.

With a head full of acid, a bag full of Schizophrenia, and

a pack a day in the hospital room where you left me,

Dad, I'm still shackled to the oxygen monitor,

I'm bleeding, aching, wanting. Waiting, waiting, waiting.

Worrying, worrying so often that I'll inherit the legacy of

ashes left for me by two burning family trees,

By the cremated Irish son-of-a-bitch, who couldn't

remember if the promises to his children were

hallucinations. He never bothered asking.

So I wait on the ventilator, and just when I think I

can breathe on my own, a gust of our dark, genocidal

history blows into my lungs, Mom, and I choke.

I'm not the son you wanted, but daughter never quite

felt right either. I was born on a spectrum of seldom

understood beauty, caught unabashedly in the middle.

Always caught in the middle. Between your marriage,

between your lawyers, between your demons and my

own. My fears that grow stronger the more I step out

Into the sunlight that should burn away the monsters,

except they've learned to live in human skin, wearing

their unmasked hate in public too; the gall.

Even if I remain virtually invisible, I suffer either way.

So on the days when I work up the courage, I crawl out

of the closet in a mismatch of skirts and dress shirts.

Will it be cloudy today with acrid, vaguely human

smoke? Will anyone see my flag of yellow, white,

purple and black, hanging loosely as my cloak?