dine on disco balls and starfish,
our jowls crashing
like cymbals,
while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball
left eye and squints his right
to line up his shot
on the world’ s smallest pool table.
Mother has a camera for a head;
it flashes uncontrollably
though she claims to have run
out of film a hundred years ago,
when father’ s penis,
an unstoppable spigot,
became a garden sprinkler,
contained by adult diapers, changed hourly,
and hourly, my sister —
shuffling out of her hiding place
in the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess
of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann
doll
in her arms — sighs
to pass the time.
Water seeps through the ceiling,
because upstairs
the bathtub overflows, for
Grandma has forgotten
the bath she’ s drawn,
and on the stove the gas is high, the flames
are heating up a pudding
over which my opa whispers:
boil, boil, loyal rubble,
follow me to the end of my life.