The Eight-Track Soundtrack to My Life Keeps Unspooling

Crystal Karlberg

The stories they told when the music stopped
were a kind of rockabilly born from tangle and twang and

too much scotch. When the smoke cleared in the car
and the backs of their heads were visible again, I could see

my father was losing his hair. We lived among the flotsam, jetsam,
riff-raff, sass-back. Not one of us could hold our tongues.

I walked on eggshells, smoldering coals, shards of literal glass.
Losing his marbles, my father would call it, when memory

began to fade. Nightly he prayed and my mother only
laughed. They never made it to Berlin, those two, or Mother

Russia. Hell, my mother never left the red-dirt South,
her drawl never far, like a brat or something else you’re

saddled with. This is my head, she told me, and this
is my dilapidated body. I’m up in arms is something you’d expect

an octopus to say if it could do more with its beak
than wound. Under water, echo is the only sound that matters.

Crystal Condakes Karlberg is a Library Assistant at her local public library and a speaker for Greater Boston PFLAG.