The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Power Point by Jane Muschenetz

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FAMILY DINNER (TALKING POINTS)

You sit down and half the country is everyone’s
Crazy Uncle, you know the kind—keeps raving
about Alien Abductions! Those Damn __________
(Liberals / Republicans / Gays / Jesus Freaks / Jews / Gun-Totin’-Idiots / Immigrants /
Corporations / Hippies / Prohibitionists / Yankees / Federalists / Witches . . . )!
History, that Old Grandmother, keeps looping
her yarn, knitting quietly in her corner chair . . .

Somebody (Mom? Dad? You?) is awkwardly trying to keep the peace:
When was the last time all of us were together like this?
Shoveling food into Uncle’s mouth,
hoping he won’t do anything . . . irretrievable
and most of us have
too much             of the wrong thing              to eat.

Eventually, a cousin (the “Sweet One”) remembers Grandma,
brings her a plate of something soft and easily digestible.
Gams alone seems sustained by all that has come before,
half-deaf and blind to all the fuss of current events, and future ones.
Even Death has lost that thrilling excitement—
having come calling so often, he used up all his interesting stories.
Now, everything is a reboot.

Some teenager’s parent is one snipe(r) away from fantastically losing it:
How many times do I have to say, “There is no God, but All . . . of us share ONE!”?
What part of “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself ” means punching your brother in the stomach?!

Cousin Mike (aka “Walden 2.0”) isn’t even here, off watching
survivalist YouTube videos about living off the land
like our illiterate Great-Grandfather from that Ukrainian Shtetl
. . . Does anyone miss Borscht, really?

We are all so desperate for a taste of anything real.

Us Poets keep trying on languages for (bite) size,
ospreys for tongues, diving after silver-scaled words:
Look- STARS! RIVER! TREE! ROCK!
See– this world, this LIFE– Oh!
the agonizing heart! Oh!
the absolute                  aching                beauty of it.

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