Meditações - escondida no relógio de cuco

We dollhouse monsters

   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.

Christopher Shannon