my mother said we could cuss.
I remember her saying this standing next to our living room windows, the four looking out into the backyard. I was maybe ten. Was she closing the blinds? Was her face caught in sun?
We were four: mother / father / daughter / son who had moved, one place to the next, then again, then again, and while other kids would get their mouth washed out with soap, while other kids had to put a quarter in a jar, she said: If those are the words you need to say, you can say them.
words so off-limits we were told at church they burned if you put them in your mouth.
I liked the cold water when I made the sign of the cross, but my mother said we could.
when the big feeling didn’t fit a darn! or a man! it could be the jaggedy sense of fuck, of a propellant shit, of an unabashed god dammit.
she said, they won’t burn, I promise.
I tried.
I swore. my skin, it stayed as skin.
–
Erin Pesut studied writing at Warren Wilson College and earned her MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Poetry South, Camas Magazine, HeartWood, Legacy Magazine, The Peal, and on VPR. Born in South Carolina, she now lives in Vermont.