Brenda Ann Kenneally shooting at a market in Troy, NY

Listen to Susan read Brenda a draft of ‘Cry Baby’ and some of the conversation that followed

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“Back to In Verse: The Making of ‘Women of Troy’” on Transom

(*note: the final version of the poem appears below and varies slightly from the version Susan reads to Brenda in the recording)

Cry Baby

for Brenda Ann Kenneally

In the gut of West Albany, in a fading white Sears house
with pale blue trim, above the cellar where she shook
to Janice singing Cry Baby wearing a glittering belt of

lemon-colored plastic, in the rough and out
of the fold, across from the First Prize
meat packing plant and through the acid

scent of blood that came from it night and day,
out of the gutter, through the pipes, up against the ropes,
against the system and stickin’ it to the man,

before the young run to Florida and the baby doll pajamas
that were her uniform at the Bottoms Up bar, after the twenty-one
year-old boyfriend and the flesh marking her as a woman at twelve,

on top of the man, below the man, before the mirror
shifted in light to reveal her body as that of the freak
ZAMBORA THE GORILLA GIRL, before her son bloomed

like a small fist inside her womb in the trailer of the headless
woman, between the years in the group home
and the months in Albany county jail, before

the coke the coke the junk the coke the reds the blues the booze,
after her mother said she did not want her, made her
a ward of the state, in the cut the heavy black instrument made

in each of her palms, before the abortion at fourteen
and through the screams the pigs made in the night,
in that fading white Sears house, she discovered

her birth certificate not with her name but with
the generic BABY GIRL KENNEALLY pressed into paper
like a blue tattoo, the paper that rested in her

the day she stood at the top of the stairs and threw
a whole dresser at her brother, threw it and then kicked the living
shit out of it, that dresser that she had sanded and

antiqued and stained rambling rose pink by hand and then
shattered in a wild-eyed rage, the dresser on which
she would lay all her most precious things to admire them

shining in the light: and here in a broken pink drawer lies the baby
twisting in the scrap of her West Albany life as Janice’s throat
fills with splinters to sing Honey, welcome back home.

–by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett