The poem below is about an (un) family–one that appears to be something that it’s not–a family where things seem to be order–but are, in fact, far, far from ordinary. It’s about family dysfuntion on a massively deceptive scale.
We wear nice clothes. We drive nice cars. We go to church, to school.
But–we are, in fact, none of those things.
We are the inversion of family.
(un)poem
everything begins and ends with appetite the edge of the photograph where the girl’s arm ends and the tablecloth begins again its grammar of red and white diagramming father / mother sister sister plates in their places knives to the right spoons roast chicken relics of 10,000 family dinners that swim white cat cadmium yellow to the windowsill on the east side of the house where we have set blue mason jars absorbing particles of spring the early face of april growing in the yard seeming untime unspace work room wood floor tangle of limbs jungled wet always never arriving