The Shape of Me

The Shape of Me Is my Granddaddy's hands, long-fingered, agile whittler, plucker of things better left unseated. Sway of my mother's hips, jitterbugging their way around the house, cleaning, purging, so many things to dance away. The sound of me, shifting against the stone at my base, turn of tongue to what is Southern and mountain and all that my mother erased from her careful mouth. My hair, black as those Cherokee women's in the monochrome pictures, nameless aunts and grandmothers, some thing they didn't speak about back then. The white is easiest; the Irish smooth, freckled for character, hazel eyes like indecision—not green as those County Kerry hills, not brown as those forgotten women in the margins of our family bible. My body, curved and swollen in the places of my mother, grandmothers, places I force tight, taut to submission, make my own against that presence in my bones that says: At the base of it, you are these people. At the base of it, you are corn and tobacco, Irish whiskey and coal dust, broken of the same bread and in the same ways, broken. —Lisa Parker 66 ...