As the family meeting disintegrates,
Mom shouts after me Now YOU sound like MY mother!
and I could hear it, Grandma Dolores shouting
There will be NO running in MY house!
              pronounced eeyin mah chaos
a resonance just south of the Mason-Dixon line,
the accent of Flightville
where the fear goes all the way up
the family tree, like climbing the beech in her yard
when she wasn’t looking, branch by branch
up past my only attempt, at seven,
to run through Grandma Dolores' living room,
past Grandma Dolores telling Mom she’d have a boyfriend
by now if she would just wear her girdle,
past the first time six-year-old Mom ascended
the carefully mortared steps of the house in Towson
with fenced-in yard and stable property value, up past
the integration of Gwynn Oak, time,
the cooper shop in Fells point, time,
we had a house slave, time, escape of a Quaker
to Jersey, time, Scituate, time, 9-year-old girl
sent over on the Mayflower, time, all the way up
to Guillaume le Conquérant, which
Mom can’t pronounce properly because
the nuns just made her repeat Dis donc, Jean Paul
où est la bibliothèque? over and over, like
she worked overtime to send me to private school
where Poetry of the French Colonies was a class,
where I first kissed a boy, suddenly, while seated
on his dorm room bed in the dark,
where the arborists will keep injecting fungicides
against Dutch Elm disease in the centuries-old trees
until they touch the top of the sky and still
I will never climb high enough to escape
the screen door swinging open
and that vicious bundle of hair-curlers
shouting git DAYown this INstant!
from the dread inheritance,
a neat, green square of Flightville
with its rusted metal fences
completely hidden in the azaleas.

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook “Character Flaws” (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) is out and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection “From the top of the sky” about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

Pat Steir is an American painter and printmaker. Her early work was loosely associated with conceptual art and minimalism, however, she is best known for her abstract dripped, splashed and poured "Waterfall" paintings, which she started in the 1980s, and for her later site-specific wall drawings.