Reasons I’m Glad that my Grandparents are Dead
by Elizabeth Burch-Hudson
If Bill Burch could see me now, he would hate my nose piercing.
“What’s that hole in your face?
Betsy,
why’d you go and let her do that?”
He’d blame my mother
and then blame her again
when I would retort that I am autonomous over my body, no matter whose bloodline or DNA
runs and maps beneath my pinky olive skin.
I know it ain’t true,
being a gendered, queered body in white supremacist capitalist state,
but I’d say it anyway—
chewing each word as it came out.
If Eva Bird were still around,
I know she would despise the way I dress.
Perhaps that is why my father,
his mother’s son,
called me Miss Belly Button USA
when I walked out the door in many a cropped shirt at fifteen.
His wife,
my mother,
was the first person to call me
“jailbait.”
The times, they are a changin’, all right,
I muster—
thanking my father for his music taste
and thanking my mother for not passing along hers.
No, instead I got her wit, her face,
and her debilitating mental illnesses.
Sometimes I have my father’s apathy,
his quietude in response to conflict and danger.
Other times, I have my mother’s sensitivity,
so great that most emotions end in tears and a stomachache.
Bill Burch passed down to me his taste for booze,
tantrums, and stubbornness
and I am glad that we must never face off.
From Eva Bird, I received an unbendable will and the ability to repress nearly everything.
I prefer the former to the latter.
If my grandparents were still alive, I imagine they would have lots to say about
my ten piercings,
not knowing that each hole makes me feel more myself,
my short shirts and short skirts and short shorts,
how I cope with the eyes that have undressed me since I was twelve years old,
my poetry critiquing the emotional inheritance they left behind—
a legacy of hiding the weird, the queer, all they feared.
But they aren’t so they don’t say anything.
I’ve always loved the quiet.
Elizabeth Burch-Hudson was born in California with storytelling in her blood, as her parents are from the Deep South, where tall tales are still currency. She was raised in the Midwest where her creativity only managed to get her into plenty of trouble, but finally, the hell out of Dodge. She is now an award-winning filmmaker and writer based in Los Angeles. While her mind still gets her into trouble, she has learned to wrestle her demons into her writing and feminist filmmaking and she writes for all the quiet, sad queer girls who haven’t found their voice yet.