Curse: A Mapping / Joshin-no-ben

1.

In second grade, you tell your mother you’re learning 
to write in cursive. Your mother becomes angry,

says you will be sorry. When your mother informs 
your father you’re doing cursey he screams at you—

You’re going to get your mouth washed out with soap! 
You practice cursive in the basement with a crayon

on a cardboard box, and when you’re caught— 
the confusion between cursive and cursey now

cleared up—you still get hit because they told you 
not to do cursey, yet you went and did it anyway.

2.

Once you broke up with a lover and she cursed you. 
She wished for you to be forever doomed to be treated

as badly in all future relationships as you’d treated her, 
for you to be forever doomed to future unhappiness.

What did she even want from you? You’d only been 
seeing each other a few months. You were gentle

when you said things weren’t really working, that it 
wasn’t a good fit for you. You were nipping it in the bud.

But now you’ve just found out people are getting 
the phrase wrong—calling it nipping it in the butt.

3.

Your mother tells you to hide your belly button 
during thunderstorms so it doesn’t get eaten.

When crows in the backyard roughen the windy air 
with their hoarse screaming, she says it’s the sound

of death. She warns you not to whistle at night 
or all the snakes will converge in response, throws

salt over her shoulder to keep evil spirits away. 
She keeps a wooden carving on top of the piano.

It’s from the Easter Islands and she rubs it for 
good luck. Its name, she says, is Aunt Aku-Aku.

4.

Your parents’ cursing style was vintage old school. 
At home, behind closed doors, if they didn’t like

someone, they’d call them a sumbitch, or your mother’s 
preference, a stink sumbitch. If they were mad about

something they’d goddamn it. If they didn’t like what 
you were doing they’d yell, What the hell do you think you’re

doing? Your swears are more visceral, involve bodily 
fluids: things are fucking shitty, you’re fucking pissed off,

you feel fucking fucked up about the current political 
landscape. Your favorite curse word: motherfucker.

5.

During your father’s slow decline, your mother’s mood 
crashes at night after dinner. Why I been curse to live such

horrible life? she asks. Her litany of regrets: marrying 
your father, coming to America, having you. In Japan,

she says, her family would take such good care of her. 
This, from a woman who eloped and never went back,

even as her father was dying. Broken-winged, childlike, 
always precious, always entitled to being taken care of.

The specific affliction of her curse? Doomed to be cared for 
only by those she holds in complete and utter contempt.