The Sign of Saturn - Sharon Olds

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

amber black look, like my father

about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

she was born under the sign of Saturn,

the father who ate his children. Sometimes

the dark, silent back of her head

reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

every night, his face turned away.

Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

into her room, and slams the door,

I can see his vast blank back

when he passed out to get away from us

and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

clear face tilts as if she can

not hear me, as if she were listening

to the blood in her own ear, instead,

her grandfather’s voice.

Walking Around With A Broken Umbrella - Noor Hindi

Because sneezing my emotions onto the fibers of your

Kleenex isn’t working, I’ve spent my days punching

mailboxes, and taking victory laps around childhood

graveyards. I know you think I resemble a Sour Patch

Kid, that my thoughts are just silly string. Maybe my

brain twitches too much and maybe I was born inside

of a teardrop. I’m all passion. But to me, you are the sun

and I’m hanging my thoughts on a clothesline for you.

If I told you to disentangle our straw house, if I told you

that I feel like a puddle that is gliding towards a sewer,

what would you say? If I asked you to set fire to the world

using only the warmth of our hands, would you do it?

                                                   *

Yesterday, I became so angry that I ate a quesadilla. Then I

smashed my desk with a snow globe. I once cried for three

days about a purple butterfly kite that refused to fly. Weeks

later, I sobbed at our toaster for burning my optimism,

and when you called me unstable, I kicked our floor pantry

just to prove you right. It was inevitable. You would spit me

out as if I was a watermelon seed. You would ask me three

times a day how I felt about broken backspaces, but my eyes

were already decomposing. Days expired. I was the rotting Jack

O’ Lantern left outside our door. Every time you told me a

truth, I used a magnifying glass to find all of your potholed

lies. Eventually, I fell silent watching the image of you,

dad, melt like the icicles that later formed on our house

gutters. I tried to hold them once, but they only burned my hands.

On An Unsociable Family - Elizabeth Hands

O what a strange parcel of creatures are we,

Scarce ever to quarrel, or even agree;

We all are alone, though at home altogether,

Except to the fire constrained by the weather;

Then one says, ‘’Tis cold’, which we all of us know,

And with unanimity answer, ‘’Tis so’:

With shrugs and with shivers all look at the fire,

And shuffle ourselves and our chairs a bit nigher;

Then quickly, preceded by silence profound,

A yawn epidemical catches around:

Like social companions we never fall out,

Nor ever care what one another’s about;

To comfort each other is never our plan,

For to please ourselves, truly, is more than we can.