TPQ OnLine
poetry by Marilyn Bates

	Mixed Blood
	Just before work in the morning, I prick my finger, smear blood on a white strip, slip it in a sensor to measure how much insulin to take. Today, I wince at racing digits on its screen, at a sugar level, so high so out of control, a life redlined in sweats and tremors, shaking for honeyed juice in the middle of the night. In the kitchen, my vision blurs as insulin spurts into my skin, disappears like the lives of diabetic friends, their fragile spokes snapped, one-by-one. I rev the engine of my car in the drive. A red glare gages oil two quarts down. My dad would roll in his grave if he knew, a grave that took him, will soon take me, our genes mixed in sugar-thick blood that blinds the eyes, clogs the kidneys. At the station the sweet smell of motor oil gurgles into the hole under the hood. My body speaks to me, no longer stumbling on slurred words. My vision focuses. I steady my hands, the panic easing into collected thoughts. Insulin kicks in, grips my life skidding into the delicious fear of dying.
	oooooooo

In November, you come back to me, Alikana* boy, reaching up through soil we once worked together as I clean out heavy-headed redmums flaked with mud. I hold their feather petals, spent from spawning seeds, and think of our seeds, the tainted genes, that took your legs, may take mine. In this soil, I hear your feet flapping on the hard mud, your father cutting you loose, shoeless for the summer, your hair, buzz cut for working rows of August corn. The canvas bag cut the shoulder of the long-sleeved shirt that kept the flies away; sheaves cracked your hands. After, you forked a hot meal, a day's pay for working the soil. Then, your feet carried you everywhere--from the dentist's, who severed swollen tonsils from your throat, to the Isaly's store where you traded the nickle bus ride home for an ice cream cone. When you delivered clothes to women who never showed their faces in town, a stock boy's wage earned you that first store-bought suit, stiff in the cardboard box. Even when you walked the streets of New York, your black wing tips glinted off the steps of Gimbel's and Saks, feet carrying you to the finery of gabardine and hound's tooth pearl and velvet buttons. Your adam's apple bobbed above the silk cravat and Kuppenheimer suit. Seams of silk stockings ran with the luxury of liquor, like thick black welts you smoothed onto legs of women who bought your lingerie. When diabetes felled your legs, you stood on stumps, proud of your flawless gait. Even then you still drove the stick shift Opel, made the three-point turn without a glitch. Now oaks blacken against the red sky. I feel your shadow over my shoulder as I crop the hollyhock for seeds, fearing this blight of legs, the hitch in my own step, the walk, without the pluck. * a small rural community along the Ohio River in Eastern Ohio

Marilyn (aka "Bobbie") Bates attributes her love for "the Garden," to those quiet afternoons of shelling peas under the osage orange trees with her grandmother or digging in her own small patch next to her father's garden. Their psyches, delicately linked like roots beneath the soil, bear fruit in her work. Most painful of all experiences is the illness which linked her to her father yet separated her psychologically from her sister, Linda. Her disease lies palpably under all of this work as she speaks of all of those with whom her blood is mixed.

Mixed Blood was previously published in Sistersong: Women Across Cultures. Bobbie's chapbook, also called Mixed Blood is now available. For informaton, contact the poet directly at bbates+@pitt.edu.

Bobbie's poem Independence Day was previously published in TPQ OnLine and can be viewed in our Archives.