My sister puts glasses away upside down.
Because our mother does,
Because her mother did,
Because her mother lived through the Dust Bowl.
One day my father sat me down and told me about epigenetics.
How the trauma he went through
As a child in an abusive home
Wrote itself into his DNA
And, in turn, into mine.
How he and his brothers,
In various ways,
Are all sick from it.
How I might be too, someday,
And I’m not sure I’m not.
I hear people say,
When will we get back to normal?
And I think of a woman born in the twenty-first century
Who puts her glasses away differently
Because of what her great-grandmother endured
Ninety years before.