Dear Jesse, by Andi Talarico

BY ANDI TALARICO

Dear Jesse,
Happy 29th birthday in prison.

Dear Jesse,
I write this to you on your 29th birthday, which you’ll spend in prison.

Dear Jesse,
Happy Birthday, little brother, in prison.

Dear Jesse,
I meant half-brother. It matters.

Dear Jesse-
I don’t know how to write this letter. I don’t know how to do it.

Dear Jesse-
I’m sorry.

Dear Jesse,
I hate you.

Dear Jesse,
Her life mattered too.

Dear Jesse,
She was 23. She was 23 and you gunned her down over $60 worth of shit heroin. You did that.

Dear Jesse,
I hate you.

I hate you for making this family the wrong kind of poor. A snarl of statistics on rural poverty, a tragedy so common, so small, you’re not even a footnote in the 10 page New Yorker article on the opioid epidemic. I read it on the train to work. I read a clinical article on the pharmaceutical industry on the train to work in New York City. In my ears, airpods scanned the highs and lows of Chet Baker. The most distant mirror.

I read about your world at arm’s length. I thought of you saying-

“Fuck you, Andrea, and your perfect fucking life.”

“Give me 20 bucks, Andrea. I know you got it.”

“You’re not better than me.”

I’m not.

I am.

I’m not.

Dear Jesse,
I watch your arrest on the news. They show a picture of the dead girl on the bottom right corner of the screen. The reporter asks you what you have to say for yourself. You snarl,

“Get out of my face.”

I am.

I’m not.

I am.

Dear Jesse,
I know you’re no broken branch on a perfect family tree. Not even a tree, really, a snarl of a thorny bush, really, a tangle of blighted limbs, really. To call anything that happens here cyclical is to bestow too much order upon it. Really.

Dear Jesse,
We have different fathers. Yours was not a great man. Let’s say that. Let’s remember that when his chemicals crested or cratered, the wrong pill, say, the wrong smoke, the wrong spike, the wrong sniff, it usually ended badly for our mother. You’re too young to remember her broken arm. You’re too young to remember when he still drank. I watched him pour a beer over her head during an argument. I watched her hurl a glass ashtray at his face and almost blind him.

Dear Jesse,
I remember.

Dear Jesse,
I was seven when you were born, barely not a baby myself. I learned how to love a new human through you, your bright brown eyes reflecting everything you saw around you, new and holy through you. You, on my hip. You, taking the bottle in my hand. You, a small version of me. You, making a big sister of me. You. You named me DeeDee. I named you Young King. I wanted to give the world to you. You.

Dear Jesse,
Our mother joked that she named you for Jesse James. She always liked the bad boys best.

Dear Jesse,
Your father was one of the worst.

Dear Jesse,
I know it was right after he died that you spent your first bout in Juvie. What were you, twelve? Thirteen?

Dear Jesse,
I know that you chose violence over grief, or violence through grief, or violence as grief, or that maybe violence is a grief, or that maybe grief is a violence in that it can murder the person bearing the weight of it.

Jesse,
It is not lost on me that your drug of choice is a pain-killer.

Dear Jesse,
I love you.

Dear Jesse,
I hate you.

Jesse,
That poor woman. I grieve for her life.

Jesse,
You poor child. I grieve for yours as well.

Jesse,
The letter I send will say just this,

“Dear Jesse,
Try to have a happy birthday. You know I’m here if you need books. Love you, little brother.”

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Andi Talarico is a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. She’s the curator and host of At the Inkwell NYC, an international reading series whose New York branch meets at KGB Bar. She's taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist, and acted as coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine for several years. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.

Inherited Trauma & Memories That Are Not Our Own

BY CARMEN MISÉ

When we first got to this country I was too young to really understand everything that was happening before my eyes. My memories were patched together like pieces of broken glass, glued with stories I would hear my mom and dad recount. I don’t remember the plane ride, or have no memory of my first day in the US. I do remember starting school. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Izquierdo, my bus driver, Manolo, and Yaime, a girl who immigrated the same year we did, and who is still my best friend close to twenty years later. Memory. Isn’t it a funny and mysterious thing? How much of it is it really ours?

Memories, I mean. I feel as though there are people walking around with memories that belong to me. I once heard my best friend recount something that happened on the school bus. She turns to me in utter disbelief that I didn’t remember and proceeds to recount all I said on that bus ride. A memory I clearly did not possess any more, but should have.

Within this complex structure of memory work, I also believe there are memories that have become ingrained in me, not because I lived then, but because they are memories I have inherited. Scientists in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have noted “the first demonstration of transmission of preconception stress effects resulting in epigenetic changes.” They are calling it “transmission of trauma to a child via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” - the idea that environmental influences such as smoking, diet and stress can affect the genes of your children and possibly even grandchildren.”

This study looked at Holocaust survivors, and while controversial, it is true that genes are modified by our environment all the time. So if it is possible to inherit “a memory” through DNA, then you most certainly can inherit a memory of trauma in other ways, I thought.

It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I had the words to verbalize what I would later recognize as inherited trauma. In fact, not only the words but the scholarly research of literary professionals who were all saying the same thing, just in different words, regardless of whether they were looking at social injustices in India, Latin America, or Europe. I came to so many realizations as a graduate student, that it’s a wonder I am able to function at all. One realization is this concept of inherited trauma and my memory of soap. Yes. Soap.

For many years my mom would collect the last remnants of bars of soap. The small, semi oval, pieces of soap that once were nutrient rich Dove, Caress or Camey bars. God forbid you threw one out, or let it dissolve and disappear if it fell on the shower floor, by the drain, because you were too lazy to pick it up. This “collecting” was a slow process. Over time, gallon zip lock bags or once I remember a ten pound empty sack of rice, would be filled. Over a period of months, we, my dad and I, but mostly me and my mom, would dutifully fill the container with bits of soap. So much dedication. And with each bit of soap added, a small sense of accomplishment, and a renewed determination to fill it up would drive our drive.

At first I did not quite get it, I just helped. It felt good to help my mom who seemed so determined to collect bits of soap. The colorful array of colors in the see-through bag made it like art project I was only too happy to help reach completion. This went on, without question, for a few years. One day, a day very much like all the others, mundane and ordinary, but special in that it’s on those days when we have our biggest breakthroughs, I asked my mom why she collected bits of soap. She looked at me, and down at the colorful, soap filled bag, after a few moments of silence she said that the soap we saved was going to be sent back to our country. “For what?” I asked. “Para lavar,” she replied. As she explained, I imagined a big tin barrel filled with scalding water, laundry, and the bits of soap I helped collect all this time, and a thick, brown woman, covered in a layer of sweat, standing over the barrel. Detergent does not exist where she comes from. Neither do washers and dryers. Too expensive.

I finally had an answer for something I was doing without question for a few years now. Although I learned to be more careful of the questions I ask, the answers are never satisfying. Surely, she could just buy detergent and sent it over? Or those big detergent soap bars I had seen at la bodega. She could send money too. That’s always an option, I thought. We could walk to the Western Union and while she sent the money I could get a gumball from the gumball machine. I hoped it was a blue one.      

Of course, I didn’t understand then that she could not simply buy detergent and sent it over, or just send money. In her mind, what my mom was doing was a continuation of what she had always done, save bits of soap. Just on a grander scale, now that she was in the US and had me to help. When she stopped, I don’t really remember. It wasn't abruptly, but one day, when I realized that I didn’t see bags with soap any more, I knew this had come to an end. Well, at least in that form and at least for her. I, on the other hand, inherited the trauma of not having enough. The trauma of caution. A repugnant feeling in the pit of my stomach when I throw away perfectly good things. I know I am doing wrong and I feel it.

The other day I ran a few errands. I went to the store and I bought a few groceries, along with “un palo de mapear” and you guessed it, soap. As I sat at the kitchen table, emptying out the last quarter of liquid soap into the new bottle, I felt the same feeling of determination and accomplishment I felt collecting bits of soap from wasted bars. And we wonder why we drag with us the history of our ancestors? Why it weighs us down? Why we repeat the same fate over and over? I giggled at myself while I sat there saving the last bit of soap. Had this come full circle? And why was I laughing? Perhaps I was anxious or nervous that I had caught myself repeating this act of trauma. The act of saving the last bit of soap, or detergent, Lysol, olive oil and lotion…. Por si acaso.  

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Carmen Mise graduated from Florida International University with a Bachelor's in English in 2010 and a Master's in English in 2015. She is currently a professor of composition and literature at Miami Dade College North campus' English and Communication's Department. Carmen was recently invited by the Miami-Dade Public Library System to kick off their Art and Sculpture Lecture Series, where she lectured on the topic of Counter-Monuments. A theory she explored in her master's thesis, and a topic she is still exploring in her writings.