My name is Padri Gautuma and poetry has changed the way I think about confession.

Rather, I grew up hearing that confession was about confessing your wrong.

But these days I think of confession as confessing your truth,

confessing what matters in a life and confessing the thing that you might not have told

but that holds you together.

Our nan lets us smoke inside by a teetable.

Our nan lets us smoke inside, but only when we drink wine and play cards on the kitchen table.

I feel glamorous when I drop my ash into the power shell in the middle.

Our nan wears black leather pumps and dries wish-bones from chicken carcasses

in an empty, margaring container on top of the fridge.

She's not my real nan, but I've always wished she was.

I wish I was born with her blood in my veins, her dark white cato DNA,

high cheekbones and heavy wet eyes just like my sister.

Our nan met her late husband in the late 60s.

She was dressed in a little mod dress, her black hair flipped.

He was a cowboy with mutton chops and tan-lined legs in short-cream shorts

who rode off to work every morning with a commercial digger for a horse,

but he'd pick us up in his station wagon on Sundays.

Johnny Cash and his metronome voice making us fall asleep against the dusty windows,

so we would stop for a fillet of fish and a strawberry milkshake for lunch and dinner,

but he always picked my sister up more.

At his funeral, Oscar was carried the mismatched flowers behind our brothers in black sunglasses.

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