When They Cry

When my father cries, he sticks his lip out like a kid, his jaw shaking, his eyes red.

He cries when a truth is told:

Someone’s leaving, the end is near, or a fault is exposed,

Guilty

Ugly.

He cries when I mention graduation.

He cried at both his weddings.

Apparently, he cried when he proposed to Mama.

When she weeps, you don’t notice.

It rarely happens.

You’ll be watching a film, usually...

At least that’s when I see her do it.

You’ll look over, and there’s a tear on her check,

Perhaps a mirage, a trick of the light,

Her skin, pale, reflecting the white of the screen.

She cries when my stepfather does.

He rarely cries, but it is an earthquake,

A disaster, rare as his anger, shaking him in his grief as he hunches,

And I press my ear against my hand,

Pressed against his back,

Pressed against my mother’s hand.

My stepmother, on the other side,

Cries with distraction.

I've rarely seen it.

She’s teared up amongst arguments, shoved it aside, feeling she must argue, but helpless to stop.

She cries when overwhelmed, when her brother-in-law’s-mother died and she couldn’t be there

Because she had a three pound baby, and health, and exhaustion.

She cried when she told me that my now little brother,

Whom we thought was dead in the womb,

That his heart was found, beating.

My father’s mother cries with pride when she sees growth in someone, other than herself

Or when a barb finds its way home,

Too close for comfort,

Just far enough to be foreign,

Not close enough for anger.

My mother’s mother cries when I do. 

Only a tear, swept away by strong hands, that pinch flames and stems and free mourning doves.

She's as walled in as her young:

The boy who doesn’t weep;

And the girl who weeps alone, or at movies.

I cry during changes.

Oft in the car, I’ll scream alone, spiraling,

Jaw locked and lips turned down, cathartic and sobbing.

Or when my mother drives, I turn my head, stare straight, fight the tears,

And hide,

Affected by her stoicism.

And yet, I lean into her arm, sometimes, when I feel soft inside.

I cry after a graduation,

A trip,

Or the end of a get-together,

Or not at all. Not for months. Not during the void or the ecstasy or the static.

I cry when I feel I’ve failed,

Deep into my pillow after punches into walls

Walls that keep a roof above me

The tears come hot, disappointed

They come with the darkness. The breaths---

Too fast to keep me running, too slow to make the urge to flee, to drown.

Tears come hot

With the change

And the cries of those before me