I am Richard Ramm

yours for the breaking

you want me to laugh at your joke, father

but smiling on cue reminds me that

I was the only one of your

children who never got spanked.

you wrote me a poem once, after

mama ruptured and before I understood.

it rhymed and made me cringe, sounding

like a love letter, an inappropriate

attempt at paternality.

I folded it up too small and hid it away, because

I wasn’t sure who it was for.

(I didn’t know the girl in the poem, and

I knew that you didn’t, either.)

when I found it beneath my

bed years later, in my box of how-normal-kids-live,

it was even more confusing

than the first time I had read it.

I spent lifetimes in faraway

worlds of my creation, longing to exist

to you, wondering why you

never developed any

hopes and dreams for me

beyond grinning and playing the piano for God.

just once, I wanted a raised voice, a wooden

spoon wacking, a failed expectation.

anything to feel like I existed.  anything to feel the same as my brothers.

but I wasn’t the same.

I excelled at being invisible, which is why you

loved me. mutual incomprehension

can be strengthened with absence, I’ve learned.

(it’s easy to think you love someone

you have only seen in smiles.)

you’ve never met me.

you created me and

pushed me off the dock; you let me bob

against the edges of your

tides and wash up onto a distant shore, where

I had to scavenge for dead fish that had met

the same fate.

when I told you I was leaving for Mexico at fifteen,

all I wanted was for you to stop me.   

all I wanted was a father who would say

“absolutely not, young lady” and ground me

and spend the next few hours talking about how

we’re gonna get through this together as a family,

like the Cosbys.

but you shrugged and acted

like you didn’t have the time or energy to put your foot down.

I never even considered telling you about my worst day.

I used to pretend that was because

it would hurt you too much, but that’s a

lie I told myself. (the unthinkable truth:

I was afraid it wouldn’t hurt you enough.

I could admit that rape wouldn’t enrage you

as much as I needed it to.

I imagined how you would brush it away and act sad

for a few minutes and then start flipping through

sports channels and breaking peanuts out of shells.)

you wouldn’t have heard anything until “abortion”

(realizing I’m speaking only when that word sets

off the morality alarm so you can organize the troops)

you would have prayed over me

and then you would have told the

whole church, a telephone chain to

share in my shame and pray away the

evil spirit that made me a baby killer.

the poem you wrote for me was titled:

“God gave me a Rose, and her name is Jamie Lou.”

I haven’t the slightest idea who you were talking about.