by Helen Frost
The whole time we talked, she was like that: Who? Why?
When? Strange thing is, I wasn’t mad. At the bottom
of all her questions was one thing—love—and the bottom
line is, I figured out by now, that’s the first
thing I need. Truth is, I don’t know exactly why
I started drinkin’. Just fun, I guess. You’re talkin’
to someone, they hand you a beer, and by the time you go home
you’ve had more than you meant to. You don’t stop
to think about it at the time. Okay, but can you stop
when you decide to? She kept pushin’, gettin’ to the bottom
of everything I said. That one scared me, ’cause when I got home
even after all that thinkin’ I been doin’, the first
thing on my mind was: Who’s around that I can talk
into buyin’ me some beer? Before I answered Grandmama, I said, Why
you need to know that? Wasn’t bein’ sassy, just had to know why
this was so important. She stopped
a minute. Somethin’ was hard for her to talk
about. Then she said, Your grandpa and your auntie both hit bottom
over this. (Didn’t mention Mama.) If it’s hard for you, you ain’t the first
one in our family. Nothin’ wrecks a happy home
faster than addiction. That’s somethin’ I want—a happy home—
and that word—addiction—might be why
this whole thing’s been so hard. Once I take that first
drink, it’s like Grandmama thought, I can’t stop
until the party’s over and I see the bottom
of the bottle. I need some help on this, someone to talk
me into takin’ that first step. Talkin’
about why is one thing; stayin’ home from parties is another.
I want to stop now, not wait till I hit bottom.
LIGHT THROUGH THE WINDOW HARRIS
By the time Katie figured out I was living
in my car, I’d saved some money. Enough
so when they asked me if I wanted to move in, I could buy
a bed that folds into a couch during the day.
I found this little room with a window,
up in the attic, and Joe said I could sleep up here.
Now if I want to be alone, I can come up here
and it’s not lonely, because I hear sounds of people living
downstairs in the house. Outside my window
a maple tree is starting to leaf out—it lets in just enough
light to make these dancing shadows on the wall every day
when I wake up. I didn’t have to buy
too much. I’ve learned what I can live without. I might buy
a small rug or something, but first I’ll look around up here.
Joe’s aunt Annie left lots of trunks and boxes full of stuff. One day
I dusted off an old chess set and brought it down to the living
room. Katie knows how to play, and Joe plays well enough
to give us both a challenge. Yesterday Keesha stood by the window
watching a game between Katie and me. Light through the window
made her face look softer than it used to. By
the time she’d watched a couple games, she knew enough
to try a game herself. It’s like having sisters, being here.
I called Mom where she works and told her I’m living
with some friends and doing okay. The next day
we met downtown for lunch. She said ever since the day
Dad threw me out, she’s been trying to find some window
she can open in his mind. When someone’s lived
as long as he has, thinking one way, it’s hard to buy
into something new. I listened to her. But now I’m sitting here
thinking, Blah, blah, blah. Neither of my parents has enough
backbone to stand up for me when they see I’m not enough
like the kid they wish I was. Maybe some day
I’ll feel more forgiving, but right now, right here,
as far as I’m concerned, Mom can take her little window
to Dad’s mind and slam it shut in both their faces. She wants to buy
me stuff. Do you need new clothes? Is the place you’re living
safe? You know what? I have enough of everything. The day
I moved in here, I took a shower and went out to buy
a bed. I’m living in a house with open windows.
FINDING HEARTBEATS KATIE
Since Harris got here, we’ve all been finding
things up in the attic and having fun
putting them around the house. A polished turtle shell
wrapped in comics from 1962. Lennon Sisters
paper dolls, must be from the fifties; old
vinyl Elvis records and a record player we can play
them on. Keesha brought down a box of shoes and hats and we played
dress-up just like little kids. I keep going up and finding
things to bring down to my room. A bed frame and an old
blue quilt, a purple lamp shade, and this funny
yellow frog that croaks when I open my door. Joe says his sister
took all the useful stuff. He said the house was just a shell
with a few pieces of ugly furniture after she went through it. She’ll
come over sometimes and talk to Joe: Remember how they used to play
the piano and sing, Aunt Annie and her sisters?
Joe remembers coming home from school and finding
them all laughing and talking and having fun
around this same beat-up old
table in the kitchen. But I found some old
diaries Aunt Annie kept, and under that shell
of singing and laughing, everything wasn’t all fun.
One time she tried out for a school play—
she wrote about working really hard, and then finding
out that all the time she thought her sister
was helping her, she was planning to try out too. Her sister
got the part that Annie wanted, and Annie got the part of an old
lady, ugly and mean. Annie wrote that finding
out what Rosa did made her furious, but she made a hard shell
around those feelings and found a way to use them in the play.
Around Rosa, she acted like it was all in fun
even though they both knew it wasn’t. Rosa thought it was fun
to see who she could hurt. All my life I’ve wanted a sister,
but who’s to say you’d get one you could trust? Playing
dress-up with Keesha is like finding a sister when I’m old
enough to pick a good one. We took that turtle shell
and put it on a table, and everyone’s been finding
ways to use it—some funny, some serious. Last night Harris played
it with his palms and fingertips, like it was an old drum. That shell
was finding heartbeats in this house: sister/sister/brother/friend.
PART VIII
PAINT AND PAINTBRUSH
THE WIDE BLUE DOOR STEPHIE
Keesha’s house is set back off the street
so if you don’t know what you’re looking for
you might not even see the wide blue door
half hidden by a weeping willow tree.
Tonight I knocked and Harris answered. He
wasn’t here when I was here before,
that one weekend last winter. It’s been more
than six months since then, and I was three
months pregnant at the time. I do this math
a lot: When would the baby have been born?
Who would she be? I’m half—no, more than half—
glad how it turned out. But something’s torn
somewhere inside me. These friends h
elp me laugh
when I need laughter. This kitchen’s warm.
IS IT FAIR? JASON
When I need laughter, their kitchen’s warm,
Steph says. I went to Keesha’s house with her
but it didn’t make me laugh. Sure,
they’re okay now, but things go wrong—some storm
coming, a couple miles offshore, torn-
up roof—torn lives. But I won’t refer
them to authorities, don’t want to stir
up trouble. We all want freedom. The form
it takes for me is leaving home to go
to college, paying my way with basketball,
all my expenses, all four years. I know
my dad will drive me out there in the fall
and back at Christmas. I’m grateful, and I show
it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s fair, that’s all.
SHIFTING GEARS KEESHA
Sometimes I wonder if it’s fair, all
the stuff that’s happened in my life so far.
How do people find out who they are,
who they’re meant to be? I want to call
time-out, hit pause or rewind, stop the ball—
no, stop the bullet—in midair.
I want Tobias back, safe in a car
with someone sober driving, someone tall
enough to see beyond the next few years,
see us both alive, safe, grown,
and say: Tobias. Keesha. It’s okay.
But—looks like I’m the driver. I shift gears,
head uphill with all the life I’ve got—my own.
I might do something about all this someday.
THREE MONTHS DONTAY
I might do somethin’ about all this someday—
how in my foster home I’m like a pet
they know they can get rid of if I get
ornery. But for now I’m doin’ okay.
We talked, I made up my mind to stay,
and if they pull that stuff, I try to let
it roll off my back. Do you s’pose ducks get wet
when water rolls off them? Who knows? Hey—
know what? I’m almost happy. Heard from Dad—
they’re prob’ly gettin’ out in three months’ time.
Time off for good behavior. I know he’s had
to put up with worse’n I have. I’m
behavin’ myself too. It ain’t so bad.
Three months. That’s a mountain I can climb.
ONE STEP HIGHER CARMEN
Three months now on this mountain. I can climb
it step by step. I say no to a drink;
I’m one step higher. I stop and think
before I head out to a party. Fine
with me if they stop askin’. Old friends of mine
say I ain’t fun no more. Used to sink
into a funk about that. Now I hardly blink.
Dontay still comes by a lot. He’s tryin’
to stay clear of trouble too. He knows some kids
at Keesha’s house on Jackson Street, and none
of ’em is into drinkin’. Friday nights he heads
down there, and lately I go too. I made one
good decision three months back. It spreads
its light ahead of me, and I walk on.
UP TO US HARRIS
There’s light ahead of me as I walk on
into my senior year. I wasn’t sure
about going back, but Katie said, If you’re
about to quit, The Jerks will think they won.
She calls them that—The Jerks—like Dontay calls me son
when he gives me fake advice: Stay pure,
son, in thought word and deed. We’ll find a cure
for you someday. I laugh. It’s all in fun.
If people we’re supposed to count on can’t
(or don’t) support us, it’s up to us to find
the friends who can and do. Of course we want
to be with both our parents in the kind
of home where we’d be loved. But why rant
on about all that? Home is in your mind.
PAINT AND PAINTBRUSH KATIE
About all that Home is in your mind
stuff Harris talks about: It’s true—
like how I kept picturing a blue-
and-yellow room before I painted mine
like this to match what I imagined.
Still, I had to have the paint and paintbrush too.
Keesha’s talking about what she’ll do
for kids someday. Take that dream and wind
it up with some of what she needs: she will
do something big. Or maybe something sweet
and small that no one knows about. I’ll
be listening someday when two kids meet:
Look for flowers on the windowsill—
Keesha’s House is set back off the street.
NOTES ON THE FORMS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES ON THE FORMS
All of the poems in Keesha’s House have been written in traditional poetic forms. These forms have been handed down for generations, and each brings its own gifts and power to the writer and, in turn, to the reader. The forms are something like houses that allow exploration within their kitchens, living rooms, attics, and basements. Often, the rules of a form provide a distraction from what a writer intends to say, leading to more interesting images and ideas.
Here are the traditional rules of each form. If you look carefully at my poems, you will find places where I have been playful with these rules and places where I have bent them or occasionally ignored them for the sake of allowing the poem to speak its mind. Always, the character who speaks the poem has the final say.
SESTINA
The sestina is a French form in which six words are repeated in a particular order as the end words of each line in six 6-line stanzas. Then the same six words are used one more time in a 3-line stanza, or envoi, which concludes the poem. Traditionally, all the lines have the same number of syllables, but I have chosen to vary the length of the lines in these poems. I have followed the traditional order of the words through the six stanzas, but in the final envoi, I have used the words in any order.
The order of the end words (each letter stands for a word) is abcdef, faebdc, cfdabe, ecbfad, deacfb, bdfeca. The traditional order of the end words in the three lines of the envoi is be, dc, fa. (The first of the two words is somewhere within the line, and the second word ends the line.)
SONNET
The sonnet is a fourteen-line poem. Each line has a given meter, or rhythm, known as iambic pentameter (daDA, daDA, daDA, daDA, daDA), and a set rhyme pattern. In the following rhyme patterns, each letter stands for a rhyme sound. In the sonnets in this book, I have used some half rhymes and near rhymes.
An English sonnet (also called an Elizabethan, or Shakespearean, sonnet) rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. The poems in Part VI are English sonnets.
The Italian sonnet (also called a Petrarchan sonnet) rhymes abbaabba cdcdcd or abbaabba cdecde.
A crown of sonnets is a set of seven Italian sonnets, linked through repeated lines. The last line of one sonnet is the first line of the next (sometimes with minor variations), and the last line of the last sonnet circles back to the first line of the first sonnet. Part VIII is a crown of sonnets.
A hybrid sonnet is half English and half Italian. The poems in Part III are hybrid sonnets, with most of them rhyming abba cddc efgefg. There are other ways of combining the different elements of a sonnet to create hybrid sonnets.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have received a great deal of support while I have worked on these poems; this book would not have been completed without it.
The time I needed for writing the book was supported by the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts, the Anderson Center at Tower View, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Through the IAC fellowship I received, I was able to
pay several youth consultants who gave me valuable insights into the characters’ situations and language. Thank you, Alyson Beery, Teia Hackley, Joel Miller, Damionne Nichols, and Joi Perry.
I am also grateful for the adult readers, friends, and consultants who encouraged me with their enthusiasm, questions, suggestions, information, and understanding. Ketu Oladuwa read the manuscript section by section as I was writing, and his perceptions about the characters were invaluable. Others who have been especially helpful are Julia Brita, Dave Brittenham, Ann Colbert, Susan Dailey, Claire Ewart, Denise Jordan, Naida Kirkpatrick, Don Mager, Barbara Morrow, John and Beth Murphy-Beams, Mary Quigley, Doreen Rappaport, April Pulley Sayre, Lola Schaefer, Margaret Schrepfer, Judge Steven Sims, Lisa Tsetse, Ken Watson, Leigh Westerfield, Ingrid Wendt, and many staff members in places where I have met young people. I thank the Allen County Public Library and the Holiday Inn in Goshen, Indiana, for offering space for writers to meet.
I am enormously grateful to Frances Foster, Janine O’Malley, and others at Farrar Straus Giroux for thoughtful, insightful, delicate editing and for all they do to move these words between writer and reader.
I am grateful to my parents and my siblings, for the heartbeats of my childhood home. I thank my husband, Chad Thompson, and our sons, Lloyd and Glen, for their support throughout the writing of this book.
And I am grateful to the student in Haines, Alaska, who asked, upon hearing a few of the poems, “How do you know these kids?” His question suggests that the characters seemed as real to him as they do to me. Although the characters are fictional, everything that happens to them has happened to someone, somewhere. I have listened to thousands of young people share the stories of their lives in conversation and in writing, and I am grateful to them for the courage they show in situations such as the ones I have written about. I hope that they will one day write their own stories, but for now, these poems are my tribute to them.
A CONVERSATION WITH HELEN FROST
When did you realize you wanted to be a writer?
I’ve always loved the creatures of the world and the words that describe them. My love of writing began as soon as I could hold a stubby crayon, and it grew with me as I entered my adult life—I don’t recall any one moment of realization that writing would be my primary life work.