BROOK BLAYLOCK

SIGNATURE DISH

Her signature dish was carrot salad.

Milk, shredded carrots, raisins, sugar, and mayonnaise

mixed together in the same haphazard way she

mixed up all her children’s names:

‘Cherry, Betty, Gail. Damn it! You know who you are.’

An early sign of the Alzheimer’s we didn’t know she had.

One Thanksgiving mom said she was sure,

since Nanar’s eyesight had gotten so bad,

she scraped the skin of her knuckles into the bowl

with her carrots. I never ate another bite.

Passed by the large plastic Tupperware bowl

she always brought, imagining thin, bloody strands of knuckle

– maybe even bone – hidden amongst her other layers.

Little did I know I was one of those scrapings.

Peeled off the mitochondrial DNA she handed down

through my mother in much the same way

she slivered herself into her carrot salad.

I passed through her chromosomes like I passed by the salad,

frightened of the pieces she left inside.

13 little proteins encoding a destiny of so much weight.

I carry it every time I forget someone’s name,

or wonder why and how I’m standing in a room I don’t remember,

or call my pet by the name of its predecessor:

‘Peppy, Callie, Mavis. Damn it. You know who you are!’

It’s then I long to seal the lid on the carrot salad

that keeps showing up on my Thanksgiving table.

She carried it in conversations with long dead relatives,

ghosts whose hallway hauntings cost her her house,

drove her to the nursing home she never realized wasn’t prison.

I hated how often she asked me what crime left her incarcerated.

How could I explain a eukaryotic jail cell?

Genetic chains binding tighter than the electronic wrist band

not letting her outside to garden.

We carried it every time I sat outside the time and place she visited.

Talked to the same little girl she kept meeting at the woodshed.

Remembered her instead of me – an interloper in my own ancestry.

Did she know her name the first time she called it?

CREATIVE STATEMENT

Although I am a high school English teacher, I have always been enamored with science, in particular, biology. Recently, I took a 23 and Me test and found I had one variant in the APOE gene indicating an increased risk of late-onset Alzheimer’s disease. My maternal grandmother died of Alzheimer’s and this, coupled with the results of my DNA test, engendered a period of serious self-reflection. Part of this process involved the production of the attached poem, Signature Dish. In this work, I reimagine the mitochondrial DNA I wish I had not inherited as my grandmother’s infamous carrot salad – a dish everyone in my family knew to eat at their own risk. Through the eyes of a child frightened her grandmother’s salad held slivers of skin alongside its carrots, the poem’s speaker grapples with the consequences of her unwelcome genetic inheritance.