Nin Andrews

The past is gone and you can’t get it back 

my father always said. But I want to tell him, you can still visit. The farmland is there, and my mother’s shadow lingers in the doorway of the stone house. I can see her now, tilting her head, as if listening for the songs of the heifers in the fields, the horses in their stalls, the Rottweilers and beagles in the front yard under the tulip poplars, the thirty stray cats in the hayloft or sleeping in the sun, the six sows in the sty before we ate them, one by one, the bantam rooster and his nine hens before the red fox picked them off, running across the alfalfa field each morning with a fresh kill in his mouth. Gone, too, is the parakeet my father kept in the tack room, the parakeet that died from heatstroke or lack of water and once, a peanut, and was always replaced by an identical yellow-green budgie who dehydrated or was cooked on a July day so hot, the barn like a frying pan with the lid on tight. (After a while, I never knew which parakeet was in the cage—Tony or Tanya or Tina or Teensy or Tallulah.) And the bees my father kept in wooden hives that flew through the holes in our screens, circling the lamps and ceiling lights. The black racers and rat snakes that slithered across the floorboards in our attic. Snakes, according to my mother, were better than the Orkin man at keeping the rodent population down. I lay awake at night, listening to the swish-swish overhead, the sound like ladies’ skirts sweeping the floor as they danced. 

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This poem was first published at Agni.

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God

The first time that I remember believing in God, I was on the playground in the middle of a downpour in second grade. I say the middle of because I was literally sitting in a circle of light with rain falling all around me. When I looked at the sky, I saw a splash of sunlight pouring down between the clouds—on me, no one else. I sat there, feeling glowy, and watched the other children run past, including Phoebe, the mean queen of our class, looking like a drowned rat, her hands over her head as if she could hold off the rain. Mrs. Ramsey, the teacher, stood by the door, yelling “Hurry up! Get inside!” I didn’t budge. Hadn’t the minister, my father’s friend, said just the night before that God is like a bright light washing over you, cleansing your spirit? Now it was happening. I sat on the swing set, gazing up at heaven. My soul, I decided, was taking a bath. Maybe I’d turn out to be the next Moses, Elijah, Noah—someone with a name everyone would learn in Bible school. I imagined a fire catching on a bush nearby, manna falling on the grass. But then the clouds moved. I got soaking wet. At the end of the day, Mrs. Ramsey handed me a note for my parents. “Why did you stay out in a rainstorm?” my father asked that evening, shaking the ice in his cocktail glass. “I thought God chose me,” I said, “but then He changed his mind.”  My mother laughed, food falling from her mouth. But my father nodded, “That sounds like God to me.”

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Our House

Our house began as a stone square. My father, an architect, added two wings onto it to accommodate the ever-expanding family. By the time I, the last child of six, arrived, it was shaped like a U. Children’s bedrooms were on the two sides of the U so we could look out our windows and see each other getting dressed. “I see you naked,” one sister would call out through an open window. Another yelled back, “I see you in your polka-dotted underpants!” From 7:00 to 8:50, I watched my sisters doing their homework, framed in the yellow light. At 9:00 sharp, the house went dark, the day ending with a flick of the switch—like a movie without credits. I lay back in bed and listened as the night sounds began: horses kicked their stall doors; tree frogs clung to the window screens and sang to one another; owls screeched and swooped over the fields, and the rooster crowed and crowed—my father always said that was because he was an Andalusian rooster and came from the wrong time zone.

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This poem was first published in Green Mountain Review.

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Aspirin

The only time the lights came back on in the night in my childhood home was when one of us was sick. I’d sit up in bed and listen after a sister cried out, “I don’t feel good!” My mother never woke—she slept through screams, thunderstorms, howling dogs, ringing phones, strangers and policemen knocking on the door. My father, half-asleep, drifted into our bedrooms on sock feet. In one hand he held a glass of water, and in the other, a Bayer aspirin. He believed in Bayer, owned stock in the company, said it cured everything—nausea, diarrhea, flu, canker sores, nightmares, pink eye, insomnia. “Take this,” he’d say. “You’ll feel much better.” If one pill didn’t work, he’d give us another. I can still feel the little pill entering my bloodstream like a tiny white tooth. 

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This poem was first published in Green Mountain Review.

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Come spring 

our farm turned green overnight. Peepers started to sing, and the flowering began, the hills turning red and pink and white, petals floating in the air like wings. Our male dogs ran off, following the scent of bitches in heat. With no bulls in our fields, the heifers humped one another. The geldings bucked and ran along the fence line as mares sidled up to them on the other side, lifting and swishing their tails. The neighborhood carpool driver, Mrs. Humphries, wouldn’t give us rides anymore—not after she stopped her station wagon one afternoon and waited for Tigger and Elaine, our two tabby cats, to finish mating in the middle of the road. “Cover your eyes girls,” Mrs. Humphries said. She didn’t want to expose her daughters “to all the indecent goings-on.” University students drove up our dirt road day and night, pulled over by the fields, tore off their clothes as they ran through the tall grass. Abandoned shirts hung on barbed wire fences; panties dangled from cattails. My horse stopped just short of trampling a couple on an afternoon ride. The pier on the trout pond was a favourite spot. If I wanted to swim, I let the Rottweiler scare lovers off. Usually, they dove into the lake’s cool green water, swam around naked till I asked if they were getting bit yet. The trout were always hungry. They nibbled pendulous body parts. 

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This poem was first published in Plume.

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Summer days

I lazed in the tall grass and watched buzzards float overhead, wondering whose carcass they’d pick clean next. I listened to cicadas sing, pulled their hollow shells from the bark of hickory trees. I built hay forts, and once, stole the burger out of Trig’s, the farmhand’s, lunch sack, replaced it with a cowpie (this was the day after he gave me a black eye). And I got more whippings than I could count. After a while I didn’t feel a sting. I learned not to look my father in the eye. Not to beg. Not to cry. Before he even asked, I said, “Nope, I didn’t do it. I wasn’t playing in the hayloft. I didn’t touch Trig’s burger. I would never steal a lollipop from the candy jar,” even if a chewed stick was hanging from my mouth. I said, “My friend, Penny Sue, gave it to me.” Or “my swim teacher, Miss Patsy, said it was mine—for swimming the butterfly.” “Is that why I saw you climbing on the stool, fishing in my sweets jar?” he asked. “Must have been someone else,” I shrugged. “Must have been,” he smirked, a way-off look in his eyes. Like he was trying to decide how much he wanted to smack me. And how much he admired a liar like himself.

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This poem was first published in Plume.

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Nin Andrews’ next book, Son of a Bird, a Memoir in Prose Poems,  is forthcoming from Etruscan Press.