Christmas 1984
It was to be the best Christmas present
ever, for a father who had stayed
home with his infant son: The Family of Children, I saw
the picture book was called. I opened
it.
Pouring tears,
I closed it. My wife asked
what it was. I opened the book. She took it.
She looked at it. She closed it and gave it back. I put it away
for three years:
the starving baby
is chewing a filthy scrap of cloth to ease its dying--the rag
of its mother's
breast like a kid's balloon after
the happy-gas has squeaked out and the happy
Happy Face face is a dwarfed, wrinkled, hideously
grinning puddle of rubber
or what is left of a frog
when a giant waterbug grips it in its pincers
and slowly and leisurely swallows the soft parts until
there is nothing left but a flattened, eyeless frogskin...
What
black milk will we have to drink before we are done
making believe such feedings never happen?
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