Keesha's House (8 page)

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 help 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?