While the adults were discussing evil in the kitchen,
my parents opposite the atheists,
I considered my father, whose face,
he'd said, his father ground
into the linoleum over spilled soup—
a revelation, dropped almost on accident and followed
with some joke. And Aunt Marnie, the half-sister,
said she'd been made to call another woman mother, a fact
that seemed worth storing immediately, although
it's only lately come to scare me. I kept
naming what I couldn't stand evil and drifting
through the light gauzy dust of the rest.
For example, I wrote I hate you a hundred times
on a notecard—I can't remember over what.
I can't believe that everything is level.
My father says it had to be this way: love
is not a gift but a giving, not a once
but an always, and risks such a long dark turn away.
I look across the island at my mother and ask a vicious question,
the notecard burns in my pocket, she says honey of course not,
God is forgiving, of course I do not think that, how could you even ask?