On Bloodlettings

“It takes a lot from you. Drinking this way. Your liver. The one doing the most living for you, detoxifying all the shit you put into your body.”

–Tommy Orange, There There

My sister’s new house is a duplex and—for the moment—it looks out on reclaimed farmland. Reclaimed, that is, from the Atlantic Ocean. It was simply taken from the Mi’kmaq. I think I spot a cow off in the distance, but it could be something else, a stump of a tree and shadow. My sister can’t see the cow, though she searches.

We’re sitting in her hot tub, the one true luxury she affords herself, her four-year-old son in deep sleep inside. My sister’s car is basic, the house basic, the yard she will have once the developers stop working will be the size of four hot tubs and that’s it. Steam rises up in the wet air until it burns away; steam peels the paint from the fence she doesn’t own.

My sister and I are talking about this essay. I’m asking permission to write about her son, to name her son in this essay.

“Of course,” she says without thought. “Lincoln trusts you. You’re his aunt.” “Thanks.” I continue staring into the long field. I don’t imagine the salt water that used to flow here, once part of the great Minas Basin. I say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” and mean it.

This is late December, post Christmas-holiday party hosted at our parents’ house, a large property with covered porch looking out over the Annapolis Valley. There, our father is constantly fighting the raccoons. They show up nightly to dig grubs from his lawn. He’s too gentle with living things to do anything but set a table, affix a long extension cord, and play classic rock on the radio while, sedated enough by drink, he sleeps. The grass dies in clumps, the raccoons fill their bellies, and my father wakes angry, wakes to enact new bylaws on these his seven acres.

In the hot tub, talking, I don’t know how my sister and I start in on it, or if it’s what we’ve been seeing in her son, or if it’s the too-conditioned water, bubbling with milky residue and hot enough that it doesn’t matter it’s winter and raining, that drives us to this place.

“Dad has to outlive Mom. I can’t… I don’t know,” my sister says.

“He won’t.”

“But he has to. There’s no other way. We need him to take care of her.” She pauses. “I’ll move. Link and me, we’ll leave.”

This is a month before my favorite uncle—the man who removes his front tooth, a dental implant, for gags—before his meaty liver refuses to clean his blood; this, so many years after my favorite uncle’s hard-partying exwife dies in a hospital south of Toronto, her liver, and so her body, failing; years after my grandmother’s liver floods with the most common element on Earth, ferrum, atomic number 26, her hemochromatosis undiagnosed until after her death; a year after my favorite uncle’s youngest is told that in his early twenties he is killing his liver; a few months after a cousin is diagnosed with the disease that plagued my grandmother; x number of days before my father’s liver will stop; x number of days before my own will too. Time is a horror show in this, the so-called new world. Time collapses here in the liver, our liver.

We can talk about the Indian Act here, though that’s not the focus of this essay. It’s worth knowing that while the Métis aren’t covered by this law— nor are the Inuit—the Canadian government, through this Act and other laws, works to control and eradicate all Indigenous bodies.

Six generations back in our family tree, genealogical records show how SINCLAIR and his wife Betsy asked for and were granted a Discharge from Treaty as members of the Norway House Band in order to receive Half-breed Scrip.

Métis lawyer Jason Madden calls scrip the largest land swindle in North America. He wants you to see the sleight of hand. kinan¯askomitin, a cooperative resource with archives in English, Cree, and Dene, explains the basic premise to scrip was to extinguish the Aboriginal title of the Métis by awarding a certificate redeemable for land or money—the choice was the applicant’s—of either one hundred and sixty or two hundred and forty acres or dollars, depending on their age and status.

I’m not sure I need to say it. But I will. That money, that land, never arrives. By accepting scrip, my ancestors are pushed from their larger communities, pushed south. Many Métis after scrip and after settlers divide and claim the prairies end up living on thin strips of land carved away by government as imaginary spaces for future roadside and railside maintenance. Post-scrip, post-promise, post-governmental-phlebotomy, these roadside communities are what’s left.

In a tweet, Robert Jago of the Nooksack Indian Tribe, speaking of the horrific six-months-long death of Barbara Kentner, Anishinaabe of Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation, plainly reminds us: As we’ve seen time and time again—if you’re Native and suspect someone may one day murder you—avoid drinking, parties,

fun of any kind for at least three years in advance—or no one is going to jail. Because the second you put Native and alcohol in the same sentence, case over.

Before my grandmother’s death in 1998, after passing as white, her barely hidden secret was finally spoken: she was Métis, we are Métis. At that point, I knew enough textbook Canadian history to know that being descendant from “Indians” meant I should feel shame.

I tested out this new understanding of my identity on a few friends. In class, we were learning about Upper Canada and Lower Canada, about Confederation, about Sir John Alexander Macdonald—and not Louis Riel or Gabriel Dumont.

“That’s so cool!” one friend responds.

In a race conscious school, where we knew each other by our skin colors, another says, “But you’re white.”

In the seventh grade, I don’t have the words to explain how both these things can be true. I don’t know about residential schools. I have no language to describe the act of passing.

It’s here, sometime after her death, that I become actively opposed to the wild partying ways of my grandmother’s family. Cards and money on the table and drinks that never empty as long as night stretches. Frosted glasses in the backyard starting at two p.m., ending twelve hours later. Drinking alone in the garage, listening to a playlist—bob Dylan, the kind of stuff you’d hear on 89.3 K-rock. Later, Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” plays and my father sings along. Pitchy, yes, but full of heart.

Along the course of these evenings, I drink water with lime and head to bed before things escalate.

Many nights, my father laughs before asking, not for the first time and not for the last, “Are you a Ferguson? Are you really?”

He’s asking if I am one of his kind.

These stories lead you to other kinds of violence. Not colonial now. Not of the liver now.

In early December, on a Sunday afternoon. I’m new to southwestern Missouri, here for temporary work, and southwest Missouri is always almost-too-hot for me. Today, my fat body is comfortable in a miniskirt and a jewel-colored bodysuit. I’m walking my dog, a large sighthound mix, his coat gone to gray now, along our normal route.

It’s three by five city blocks and no further. Beyond these boundaries— the downtown streets of Joplin—sidewalks disappear, men don’t yell at you from their trucks as they fly past ignoring speed limits, they yell at you from their porches, day drinking or hard-buzzing on methamphetamines. In a park, its glorious fountain studded by creepy cherubs, where a historic sign informs passersby that on this land the House of Lords formerly

stood, homeless men and women camp out from the heat. On a walking tour arranged by my new employer, I’m told this was a bar and a whorehouse—of course, in genteel, Midwestern words. There’s no mention of the Native peoples who lived on this land, who were violently cleared off the land, who were relocated along the Trail of Tears just south of us. The historian wants us to know about the House of Lords and the Fox Theater, where in the 1930s white people dressed up to watch movies. Now, the theater is a nondenominational, almost-megachurch. Their pastor is the town’s mayor.

This park, this church, are inside my safe zone. I avoid the park when someone is sleeping on the benches. I watch for sharps but mostly find discarded airline-sized bottles of cheap spirits. On Sundays, I avoid the church. Walking along the park’s low brick fence towards the post office, the dog pulls hard with enthusiasm. The heat isn’t touching him yet, but for me, the air is sticky or I am. Aware of my body, I notice a sedan, brown or taupe, slow as it overtakes me.

On a twenty-minute stroll, I’m catcalled or hollered at, on average, two to three times. When people share the sidewalk with me, I tense up, not sure if this will be uncomfortable or my other daily encounter.

Them: “Oh, what kind is he?”

I’ve said these exact words a hundred-thousand times: “I don’t know. I got him from the humane society, and he kinda just kept growing.” They laugh.

When the dog finally relaxes, he’ll fall to the ground, expose his belly, and wait for these people to finish admiring him. Occasionally, once I feel safe, slip into the script, they shift, and suddenly they’re talking about my ass like I’ve invited them to, like this isn’t Main Street, where they treat their families to dinner on payday.

Today, what’s outside of the normal is that the driver of the sedan, who follows me with his eyes, who turns right two blocks ahead, who then pulls a creaky U-turn, idles at the intersection until the dog and I catch up. Crossing in front of his car, I’m nervous, trying to ignore him, trying to watch him too.

I pretend to scroll through my social feeds.

He turns, following slowly, lingering in my blind spot.

My white skin protects me in many ways. I’m also aware that Indigenous women and girls and two-spirit people get lost like this. The number of confirmed missing and murdered Native women over the course of the last three decades alone is 5,712. It’s genocide and most settlers don’t know about it. In Indigenous communities, we know that number is much higher, that our disappearances aren’t documented, aren’t acknowledged, aren’t as important as others.

Where the city’s cheap petunias and public garbage cans stop, the driver of the sedan executes another U-turn. He crosses four lanes of traffic, parks in front of an abandoned optician’s shop. After my favorite uncle’s death, I notice the shop bears his name, sharply—like a pulsing wound.

The man crosses the road at a half-run. The road is quiet. The sidewalk is quiet. The post office across the street is closed. He’s dressed like every serial killer in every show ever made. Shirt buttoned too high, tucked into pants also positioned slightly too high on hips, the colors between the garments almost coordinating; a belt, closed-toe shoes, both leather. It appears as if he’s trying to blend in.

“Is your dog friendly?” he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. “What’s your name?”

My dog inches forward, eager for this man to acknowledge him. “Nix, sit,” I tell my dog.

“What’s your name?” he asks again.

“Jen.”

“I’ve been watching you,” he says. “You live around here,” he says. “Your body is beautiful,” he says.

One thing is clear. He’s afraid of my dog. That fear grips me, cuts into the space my lungs have to expand. Every time Nix twitches forward, the man backs away until he’s perched on the curb. He isn’t put off enough to leave, claims rights to ask intimate questions. “Do you have a boyfriend?” I lie and add, “Come on, Nix, sit, would you?” My dog pulls again. “Why does your boyfriend let you walk alone?”

I mumble something, can’t recall what I say to this.

“Do you know that your body is beautiful?”

This, too, is a blank.

“Does your boyfriend live with you?”

I lie.

“Does your dog bite?”

I lie.

Sitting tall, Nix pants under the heat. Peripheral shadows shift with the sun. Trying to control myself, to figure out how to escape without upsetting this man, my knees weaken. Without forcing his hand, I manage, “I have to go, I really have to go.”

At first, he doesn’t abandon his spot, between the lamppost and the crosswalk’s faded white paint.

When he leaves—no, when he lets me leave—to avoid the direction he will drive, trembling, sick, dizzying, I travel two blocks outside of my safe zone to get free. Along a retaining wall, on a street I never use, I find pseudo-inuksuit built from orange-red stones. The cop shop is nearby. But there’s no point in that. Not the way I’m dressed. Not the way the police

will look at me, big beaded earrings, the side of my head shaved, my thighs exposed, my breasts as they are every day, heavy and present.

At home, I want to drink or to hurt myself in some other way. I take notes on my phone, in case. I warn my Quapaw petsitter, who lives with the dog while I’m away, describe the man, his sedan.

Friends tell me to go to the cops. “Report him,” they say. “Make sure he doesn’t have a history.”

They don’t understand why I won’t.

The next morning, I leave the country for a month—heading back to Nova Scotia for the holidays.

Snap.

Fizz.

Nausea is followed by the sink of dread and I dizzy.

Snap, snaps everywhere. In the Thai restaurant where they simply don’t do fountain pop. In the strange quiet of the movie theatre before the noise hits. Unless you’re rich, everyone knows to smuggle in snacks. As is, it’s expensive treating Lincoln to Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse in 3D. In the semi-dark room, snaps echo off like little bullets. Snaps, even in my own home, when I’m alone, coping with stress in the worst way: a faux sugar like high-fructose corn syrup that my liver processes like real sugar and the oh-so-satisfying carbonation burn I can’t find replicated anywhere else. Once, a white neurologist prescribed Coke for my debilitating migraines. “Do you want designer drugs or the over-the-counter treatment?”

My legs dangle in the air, the paper under me crinkling. Though I’ve never heard it used to describe pharmaceuticals, the word designer signals I can’t afford that option. “I don’t like to take pills.”

He nods. Doesn’t bother scribbling this down. “500 mg Advil, 500 mg Tylenol, and one can of Coke.”

In my twenties, Coke as medicine thrilled me because I could afford it and I loved it. Cheap, easy calories. These are my favorite. Though I’ve kicked a childhood of Pop-tarts and Coke for breakfast, I haven’t severed those lasting emotional ties.

The snap seduces me. The snap pisses me off. It does both at once. When anger takes over, my skin and heart muscle cells redden. This is when I’m most like my dad. That family joke, I’m not one of them. But to say it, they willfully ignore this: rage forcing my hand to smash against a wooden table, against other solid things.

Leading into the kitchen in the house where we last lived together as a family, the hallway is tight. Two load-bearing posts bisect the room. An indoor fence painted antique white divides that too-small, too-cramped, always

infuriating kitchen from the formal dining space. For a while, my sister’s drum set sits in the formal dining room, directly above my bed.

I can’t remember what sets me off. The teakettle is probably whistling. Red Rose Tea with milk from the bag is still my mother’s favorite. For now, my mother is well.

My father is not home. In this house, we always have enough food. I have a job. I go to university. But in anger, I slam myself so hard into drywall, so hard that I sink into the negative space behind the wall, behind our lives, in that duplex a city block north of Toronto.

In the morning, my father will see the ruptured drywall but won’t ask me for the story. He’s learned from experience. I’ve learned by watching him. These impacts traverse our bones, jarring the spongy marrow. These impacts are hard enough to teach, daily, those twenty billion new red blood cells and the iron they carry how to act differently.

Alicia Elliott, speaking of epigenetics, the passing across generations of harrowing bodily effects, says: There was no scientific reason this should be the case—no DNA sequences has changed—yet it clearly was. The evidence was all there, suggesting that not only a person’s environment but also their individual decisions could alter the expression of their genes and this influence the lives of their descendants.

The first thing I reach for when I’m sad, stressed, angry, upset, sick, depressed, or suffering from any other deep feeling is a can of Coke. The first sip holds me. Sometimes the whole can does. Other times, I’m left dissatisfied, can taste how Coke is cheaper than juice, cheaper than milk, how Coke is safer than poisoned water.

In impact, here, I become my own epigeneticist.

Tall for a four-year-old, Lincoln always wears a beanie or a hoodie, a style that reminds me of his mom and dad and not of a child. Before the basic house, the hot tub, Lincoln and my sister live temporarily with my parents. A little less than a year.

“Look! A beer tab!” He holds it, shining with pride, between thumb and index finger as we get dressed to play on the raccoons’ clawed lawn. He learns quickly, my nephew. Calls all canned beverages beers. He discovers forgotten tabs in his pockets gleefully. Asks for them as soon as he hears that snap. Collects these little signs of the liver and holds them close. It’s after Christmas but before the New Year. The men are telling riddles—everyone who is alive right now is alive, though my favorite uncle is complaining of feeling generally unwell and is refusing to have his glass refilled, hasn’t popped his front tooth out at all. The men read from little slips of paper found in Christmas crackers. The four-year-old doesn’t understand. Can’t read. But he wants to play—loves play.

In the dining room, they guess, searching for the pun, the trick, laughing. I’m only half-listening, probably on my phone, probably tired, though not tired enough to remove my green paper crown.

Lincoln misses the cues, but guesses, his body wiggling with enthusiasm. I don’t remember if we’ve had dessert yet. But at this house, after excellent meals, we always have excellent sweets. In this house, they only stock mini-cans of pop, mostly sugar-free, deeply dissatisfying. In this house, unless I have a migraine brewing, I drink water.

Lincoln’s learning how to wait for his turn, how to say, Excuse me, Papa, or Excuse me, Jenny. He makes up his own riddle, asks, all in a rush: “How many wines can you drink in a day?”

I cringe.

My sister raises her eyebrows but neither of us says anything. Three months later, my favorite uncle dies in a hospital named after British royalty because his liver is sick, diseased, because of genetics, and because of drink. We will hold two weekend estate sales, where strangers come into his home, his big red barn stuffed with all of his things, buckets of nuts and bolts, his plants, his collection of tiny clocks.

January bleeds into late March. I spend the winter months avoiding the man who followed me, flying to interviews for permanent jobs, sitting at the same gate in the Dallas/fort Worth Airport, thin gray carpet under my mukluks. I’m crying and eating breakfast tacos and counseling my sister on whether Lincoln is too young to visit the ICU, all while my phone vibrates with messages that say my favorite uncle is worsening. That his sons ought to come home now. That the doctors don’t know why his blood infection continues, if he’ll be able to keep the infected eye, if a pocket of bacteria is colonizing his heart. That his liver, kidneys are failing. That a liver transplant is not an option. That a living donor doesn’t change this fact. When Delilah Saunders—inuk from Happy Valley Goose Bay, NL, and sister to Loretta Saunders, murdered while researching missing and murdered Indigenous women in 2014—was diagnosed with acute liver failure and needed a transplant, the Trillium Gift of Life Network’s six-month sobriety rule disqualified her. Her family and friends called this ruling discriminatory.

This winter, I’m teaching Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, a book about the liver. I don’t understand the liver any better having read Rankine’s book. Though that isn’t Rankine’s fault. Her book is also about death. Though I know I’m doing a disservice to this text by trying to tell you what it’s about. You can’t do that with poetry, with the lyric essay. In the book’s first section, Rankine’s speaker, talking of a friend’s cancer, says:

The lump was misdiagnosed a year earlier. Can we say she might have lived had her doctor not screwed up? If yes—when does her death actually occur?

I’m at that stupid gate, two weeks before spring break, bad tofu banh mi and a Coke rolling in my stomach, when my sister texts me a twenty-minute voice recording of a family meeting with my favorite uncle’s doctor. Everyone is there, including Lincoln. My family’s voices in a static bath fill the terminal even with the volume on low. My own ears echo as if underwater.

I’m listening to my favorite uncle’s doctor telling us he’ll either get better slowly or get worse fast. Listening to the doctor say, living donation is not possible. Listening to how my tough, no-emotions sister’s voice waivers, how she asks Lincoln to be quiet a little longer, how my father sounds at a point beyond exhaustion. The next time I sit at this gate, I’m texting my favorite uncle’s oldest son—he’s shotgun in my sister’s basic car—while they search snowy streets for my mother, delusional and off her meds, while my favorite uncle hangs on, today better than yesterday. Tomorrow, though, he will be worse. I’m at that gate listening to the recording of my favorite uncle’s doctor talking and thinking about Claudia Rankine, thinking, This is when he dies. A week before spring break now, at the same gate, in the same seat, I fill myself with Coke to quell the nausea, to feel something burning.

And if I tell you those of us in the second astrological sign of the current zodiac are most likely to be addicted to food, do you think nod-nod (in the way some of us have learned to think our actions instead of acting them) or do you think, perhaps, I’m imposing my problems on the bull? Do you laugh when I say, wait for me to make the connection for you, and when I do, you’ll see it reflected clear as any surface of undisturbed water? Do you exhale? Do you feel sorry or sad when I tell you, yes, alcohol is food, drink is a food group, and you can consume entire meals of corn, potato, and other grains without ever needing to chew? to mix contents with saliva to soften it? to consider the liver? to consider red blood cell production? On the prairies we simply call it rye, and we bury our treasures in velvet sacks, knot our prizes with gold cord.

After my uncle dies, I don’t cry, haven’t cried. Not when I return to Dallas/ Fort Worth, a different terminal, thankfully, this time. Not even when I tell my aunt, standing in her renovated kitchen, “This was the last place I saw him alive.” I don’t cry when she cries at my words. Or as I emcee the celebration of life—because no one else can do it without salt-tears. They pick me because I’m dry.

Not at the too-cold funeral home, where my uncle lays under a floral bedspread meant for an eighty-year-old’s guest bedroom, his face too orange and too empty. Not when I wonder what they did with his removable tooth.

Not when, after the celebration of life, one of his sisters gets smashed and carries on, and not in the morning when my sisters, both sober and mothers and afraid of what’s inherited, tell me how our aunt ran through the yard and into the woods, saying horrible things, scaring the raccoons. After the funeral, my aunt says, “We’re all going to die.”

She’s right, but doesn’t stop pouring vodka into an extra tall Pilsner glass.

Six days before Taurus season begins and still I can’t cry. I walk my dog. I haven’t seen the man who followed me since December, though I actively avoid his side of the street. After the funeral, my prescription sunglasses are forgotten at my parents’ house and my mom’s delusions tell her to hide them from me. The late-afternoon shade belongs to him.

I’m near the park when light catches against dirty glass and I see my name.

Under the phone number for the restaurant where he works—this, the old location, unsold, still branded, but thankfully abandoned.

It’s finger painted in the dust.

It could be anything. Chance and consequence. But assaulted for the first time in middle school, in a stairwell that I didn’t learn to avoid until it happened a second time, older now, I’ve honed these instincts.

He’s still watching.

A few days later someone breaks the storefront glass and I feel better. Feel as if I did it, my dominant hand aching and red.

Hemochromatosis: in which the body loads too much iron.

One of the treatments for hemochromatosis is to give blood.

To give blood, they say, saves a life.

For those with hemochromatosis, in giving blood, they both save themselves and others.

For alcoholics, liver damage is a guarantee. It seems alarmist to say there is no known quantity of alcohol that is safe—even if the resveratrol red wine contains has health benefits. The list of possible outcomes related to alcohol consumption is long, and includes fatty liver, cirrhosis, hepatitis, and even cellular mutations that can become cancers. Unprocessed alcohol, what the liver cannot deal with upon first arrival in the system—the overload—recirculates through the body, creating generalized suppression of blood cell production and the production of structurally abnormal blood cell precursors that cannot mature into functional cells.

And if red blood cells carry the most iron in our bodies, for those with hemochromatosis, is alcoholic consumption a kind of self-medication? I wonder if there’s something that tells my father, my living uncle and aunties, my cousins, my own body to drink. Some cellular call.

A snap.

A snap, snap.

Waiting for the fizz, waiting for it, wanting it and not wanting it. As with all self-medication, of course, the attempt to resolve damage leads to more of the same.

I learn my lessons—i no longer WEBMD myself to death—but I can’t stop researching. Can’t stop thinking about joint pain, my hip aching for no reason except that joint pain and this family disease are linked. How for now, as a menstruating woman, I’m regularly voiding iron. How expensive it is to get tested here in America. How threatening I find the white family staring, smiling directly at the camera on the Iron Disorders Institute website. How it’s white people that are most affected. How the website tells me other gene combinations [can] result in hemochromatosis regardless of a person’s ethnicity. When I was a teen I read the warning label on my antibiotics and one of the possible side effects was sudden death. Other signs of this disease— fatigue, depression, infertility, diabetes—are simply facts of modern life. I can’t stop thinking about how blood is messy outside the body. How blood is messy inside the body too.

A friend messages me: “I know you won’t want to accept this offer but I’m making it anyway—i’ll pay for your liver test if you need it and can’t afford it. And I’m sorry if that’s a weird offer but I value and care about you and I want you well.”

How that’s what it takes. I buy the test.

Canadian Blood Services, the organization in charge of blood and blood products including stem cells, organs, and tissues in Canada, denies men who have sex with men the right to donate. As is the way with bad laws, they get on the books, and later when the books change and we have new tools, those laws somehow become the kind we simply grandfather in. I’ve never donated blood, though I am and have been since I earned my learner’s permit at fifteen, a registered organ donor. Discrimination isn’t the only reason I haven’t. But it’s a reason to be angry. Other systems want to eliminate what they designate as unruly bodies too.

My grief for my favorite uncle is stalled. It stalls on this question: Did his doctor shut down the possibility of living donation because of implicit bias against an alcoholic? Against a family of them? Or because the word no is easier than an explanation?

Canadian Blood Services call it screening criterion. They say, donation is a gift, not a right.

The liver both stores and produces sugar. Depending on the body’s need.

This essay was supposed to decolonize my relationship with alcohol, with the liver. In this, I’ve surely failed. This essay only shows the sweet that binds, that rots, that colonizes me. The emptied and crushed cans in my kitchen. Though I’m terrified about what we are doing to the land, I do not always recycle.

This essay owes me $120, the cost of an Ironology™ Iron Panel. This essay owes me for whatever forced bloodletting may come.

In some ways, I wrote this essay to write these lines: In the town where I live, you can buy donuts from the neo-nazis or from the Christians. These are your only options.

This essay isn’t easy.

Alicia Elliott writes: Your decisions and traumas are never solely yours alone, or even yours and your children’s. Your decisions and traumas mark every subsequent generation after you, creating ripples in the future that can’t always be anticipated and can never be controlled.

The bullish part of me wonders what happened, what happened for hemochromatosis and alcoholism to revisit us over and over. Did my Métis grandmother’s secret mutate inside of her? Did signing for scrip break something in my ancestors’ bodies? Was it the last of the buffalo? Was it before that?

Or was it my white great-and-great-and-great-and-beyond-grandparents, their colonial poisons? Are my white mother’s delusions carried down? Her own grandmother was institutionalized after the birth of her children— because post-partum depression could not be conceived.

Was it something small, something hard to see?

Am I looking for it now? Am I seeing it in a four-year-old?

I do not envision a future where I’ll have children of my own body—not with what we’re doing to the earth. But part of me wants to believe if I change my path, there’s a kind of magic like epigenetics that can change the path for my nephews, my niece.

For reasons—the unseeable ones and those still taking form—i am sober, straight edge, a little uptight, a little bit perfectly boring.

I’m learning to say sober with pride. Learning not to cower with shame. Holding bloodletting as metaphor. As a way of transferring what I practice here, what I make my own here to you. This, Celan’s handshake. This, Rankine’s here. Practicing a kind of epigenetics for human connections. Practicing to let the blood, to purge excess iron, to keep liver tissue living, to remain safe, to be able to walk the dog safely, to make a home in my body. To help you make one in yours. To build one for all of us living right now, all the dogs and raccoons and shadows of cows, and all of us not living any longer, and all of us to come.