Domestic Drama

Everything I had hoped to learn on intimacy fell apart
when I was seven years old. Give or take,
it wasn’t the kind of thing that hits once:
my father, coming home late;
my mother, running out of names to throw at my father. Furniture
being tossed like weightless dolls. My father,
slamming doors; slamming my mother
to a wall. My sister whispers sometimes
the story of how father almost pushed mother down
our carpeted stairs. She said the walls held none of father’s fingerprints,
for some reason. So we children, unsuspecting, believed our parents
when they explained over breakfast, trying to hide
the circles under their eyes, how we should not worry.
How, the glass shards left from the night before were not to be
given names. We children, lacking evidence, had to resort to memory-
memory: ever-unreliable and quick to sweep
certain details under the rug. Even if it doesn’t seem necessary-
like setting apart everything that happened, trying
to fit them into wooden frames- all the things that would eventually lead me
to disbelieve, all those stories of families who knew what it meant to be happy, framed in their own universes; familiar with the names of everything they ever felt,
while the best I relied on, was my memory, constantly subject to faults,
and the old photographs that featured strangers that bore our faces,
their smiles perfectly painted.