IF I COULD CHANGE

If I could change the way I lost my father, who died suddenly when I was sixteen which was not sweet, who had already left us years before for a red-headed woman who was only a whore even when I forgave my daddy, and if I had not said to him the night he died, after he failed a test for the LVPD, 


“It could have been worse, Dad, you could have had a heart attack” so the guilt mingled with my mother’s words that he didn’t know Jesus, I would not have made the deal with God to eat his sins, and then look for him in every bad man I would let inside me, and try to resurrect his four-pack-a-day habit until I said “no more”

Then I might change the way I lost my sweet grandma Hazel, whose house smelled like Cashmere…