I wouldn’t be here. Or not like this?
Grandma’s blonde ringlets had gone bald,
her teeth missing slots, her eyes—
gray-blue rime.
My Umatilla grandfather
who had one leg, lived down the road,
hobbled to her heroin loyally.
That’s how
my mom and dad, neighbors whose parents
were good friends and fellow addicts,
met as kids, played together
on Frieda Street, those mornings
they’d visit Aunt Bonnie
in that bright yellow house
that was always so dark inside.
She’d make them coffee with sweet cream,
hers with vodka, silver spoons clinking
sugar into acid, while they waited
for their parents to sleep off.
For the house to forgive itself. If it could.
I was a one-and-done, they said,
like mule deer or dancing grebes or rainbow trout,
born under shaded pines that twist
like watermelon rinds, beneath starlings
that sizzle like dice scatter.
Thank God for the parties, the pickups,
the way one fourteen-year-old boy’s sperm can
wobble its way into a fifteen-year-old girl’s egg,
made on that mountain
by parents who left me wild. Which is not the same as free.
Amiya Moretta lives and writes in Iowa City, Iowa. She is a 2024 Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and a Fulbright Fellow. She recently won the 2026 DISQUIET Prize.
