I'm almost done knitting a very rushed dareth doll, and it's really making me wish I liked doing crochet instead cuz man it would be easier with crochet. Not gonna lie, this doll looks terrible 😂 I was desperate

my blood pool is small

there were never many, a family history of miscarriages saw to that, so now in the year of our lord 2017 the only ones left are my dad and his dad and brother

and me, the only woman alive with our last name

my dead great grandmother who wrung her hands worriedly and told me every day that she was going to die soon and then gave me $2 and a reeses cup and loved me in the weirdest ways, who gave me nearly anything i wanted and that once meant giving me the crucified Jesus figure from her wall and letting me play with it like a barbie. who constantly emitted a tina-belcher-esque groan of pure anxiety, which made people tell me i was going to grow up and be nervous like her if i didnt Stop Being like This. my dead great grandmother, a child during the great depression, born the same year that the Titanic sunk, who watched her evil grandfather murder litters of puppies and kittens rather than have to feed them. my whole childhood, she had a horde of cats. she picked up every stray cat she saw, let them breed and multiply, like she was saving every dead animal she saw growing up

my dead grandmother, who was losing her eyesight when i was 6 years old. she held my face for a long time one day; it was spring and i was playing in her front yard. she held my face and i asked her “why” and she said “i want to make sure i remember exactly what you look like after i can’t see anymore”. she was sick her whole life, in and out of hospitals as long as my dad could remember. one day when she knew she was dying sooner rather than later, she took my dad, her son, she took him aside and told him, “god, please, if you do anything after i die, i want you to make sure Hannah knows i fucking loved her”. an old woman with a laundry list of health issues, including some that inhibited her breathing, but one day when i was 5 i told her i wanted it to snow, and she says well we can’t make it snow for real but we can pretend, and what she probably had in mind was cutting out paper snowflakes but i came out of her bathroom with a bottle of talc powder and she did not scold me as i laughed and sprayed powder all over her house and told her, grandma, it’s snowing!!!!! she coughed from inhaling copious amounts of baby powder but said nothing and laughed because i was having an amazing time and she knew that. she told me once, in a moment that was probably too heavy and honest for a small child, that she had wanted more children but miscarried repeatedly and only had my father. but then she had me. a woman that was 5′4 and forever frail due to illness, but swore like a goddamned sailor and was known to grab a full grown man by the front of his shirt and thrust an angry, pointed finger in his face while telling him EXACTLY where he could go.

my living grandfather, a widower, a sailor who traveled the world and a truck driver who continued to travel the world, but by land making deliveries rather than by sea making war. he smells constantly like a garage, like metal and oil, has blackened fingernails from being wrist-deep in a vehicle only moments ago. in his navy photos he is so terribly terribly terribly handsome, with black hair and the same green eyes that his son has, that i have now. i have him to thank for my overly large front teeth and for how he, over the years since her death, has been trickling me a steady supply of all my grandmother’s jewelry, giving me a new piece on every birthday and christmas. when i close my eyes and think of him, i think of rags, always rags, sometimes white, sometimes red paisley bandanas, hanging from his back pocket to wipe his brow. i think of how he helped me grow pumpkins and we picked tomatoes 

my living great-uncle, who was never entirely there and is even less here now. as a teenager, my dad pranked him constantly. he more exists in the way others react to him rather than as a person who does things. he exists as a person who fell for it when my dad would put hard things -- bricks, model cars, paper weights -- into his pillow at night, and then continued to fall for it every single night, and never thought to just start checking his pillow before flopping into bed.

my living father, a child of poverty, a long-haired music-loving teenager in the 70′s during the height of KISS’s popularity. he always joked that he was born with a guitar pick in one hand and a wrench in the other, and i was too young to know he was kidding. he learned to play “Freebird” when he was 13, and was in his first band at 15. he tells me i am the best thing he’s ever made in his life, but i know better, because if i hadn’t been born his music career would have really taken off and he might have been famous. but he settled for being my dad instead. and he has been so good at it. truly a Renaissance man, throughout my life he has built me various different bunk-beds, push cars, radios, computers, and lamps. he gave me everything i could have ever wanted; we had no money, but he damn sure had a hammer and some nails. as a teenager, he began building his little cousin a wooden car out of kindness, only to take an axe to it and destroy it before it was finished because while my father was sawing&measuring&thinking, his little cousin stabbed him hard in the back with a sharp stick. a man who let me keep every stray dog i ever brought home, who took me to historic cemeteries, who loved southern rock but also collected tarot decks, who loves guns but cried every time his father hunted deer. 

and me.

we were never many and now we’re even less. my small bloodpool is made of rusty garages, cars with their hoods up in the yard being dissected; my blood is made of my dead grandmother’s blood, which she measured every night by pricking her finger, then accidentally left subtle blood spots on every pillow and cushion where her hand then rested; my blood is made with crochet patterns for doll clothes stacked up in drawers, balls of yarn; my blood is a hot southern night with a box fan stuck in the window, crickets singing loudly; my blood is poor people who made it work, somehow; my blood is a sofa patterned with orange and brown flowers, with yellow-colored foam rubber poking out at the corners; my blood is wood paneled walls, my blood is lace doilies on the end table; my blood is work boots, worn as fuck; my blood is a guitar that is polished and re-strung with needless repetitiveness; my blood is sawdust; my blood is making the smart decision even if it isnt the fun one. i wish we were more.