THE FAMILY Jennifer Denrow

Suppose you’re at the video store checking out ten videos about families. And suppose the video store clerk is being very kind and not saying anything and asking for your ID. And suppose he gets an idea and starts playing one of the videos and this is so you can watch it together and so you sit on the floor and start watching. And then suppose a family comes in and loves this movie and begins to watch it with you but pretends they’re only looking for a video they can’t find. Now it’s night and the family invites you over for cube steak. When you get to their house, you realize you are their only child and you don’t like water so your mother bathes you in salt and when she puts you to bed, the bed is so small you hurt yourself trying to sleep. In the morning, you hold a family conference and suggest that you’ve grown and that perhaps you do like water and can’t help from wanting to clean yourself with it. Your mother gives you a haircut and you start realizing how small she really is and then you know you must really be the mother so you take her hand and put her on the bus. 

 

THERE IS DINNER

Slow enough, the walls

the air, let light. 

It’s obvious, after morning

after day,  

the tree oustside. The leaves.

Breaking the light. This need 

to be empty. Relaxing our necks

on each other’s bodies 

and later, the grocery store

groping the things we want 

to be ours. There is dinner.

After dinner, the driven  

home relatives. 

 

FROM CUT-OUT PAIN

So many birds eat things that I’m beginning to accuse the things of being birds. I assume the rescue crew has already come, so what’s left isn’t in danger. I pick one cut-out from a box of cut-outs. It’s a coat, and when I try wearing it, I give my arms pain. This is really like us, I tell my arm, which is far away now, in a musical performance. In better times there are trees to sing in to. I put all of the animals near them. They resemble all of the other animals. What reappears is familiar enough to compare to what is already here.