My dad carried it with him from Dallas to Oregon in '75, after Texas and the Army spit him out. The weight of it demanding more than one syllable. Sh-sh-shame like the deep baritone of his sorrow plucked into harmony when he was drunk doo-woping to Motown songs at the bar. If I'd known that correct speech was hyperbole, that my slippery S's and T's weren't an impediment, but part of his legacy, I may not have Sally See Sawed my way through speech lessons till I could speak "right." Had I known right wasn't always a straight line, that the mastectomy scar below my right breast if seen in the right light resembles a ripple on calm water after a heron takes flight, I might have sought refuge in my inability to let go of sound's repetitious comforts, rolling my tongue around each S till it stretched its long body out to bask in the light between my teeth, the way I bask in the knowledge that my stutter wasn't mine alone, the way I sometimes run my finger along the scar line wondering what it would feel like to live there, the way bra wires once lived there, the way anticipation once lived there, the way a lover's breath once held me captive, trembling. This ceremony of gestures. This ritual. This tenderness. I don't blame my father his absence, not really. He who un-sutured me with his constant leaving. I know what a black man whose father was a black man, whose father was also a black man, is made to endure here. I don't know the pro- nunciation of his traumas, but I can feel them, how easily they slip under my tongue, force my words to trip over themselves. During this havoc I sense him tending our legacy, just as the doctors tended my wound — the kindness of morphine, the anesthesiologist's sweet talk. After they stitched me up, I knew there was more than an absence of tissue left inside. Sometimes, at night, I can't help, but search for a mistake, an opening, a stutter of forgotten thread, something inarticulate to grab ahold of, wrap my fingers around, to pull and pull and gently unravel me.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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