American Chordata: Magazine of New Writing Issue One, Spring 2015 | Page 40

Family Dinner

22 • PO
ETRY

The wife could not let the painting hang
On the living room wall. Flat, acidy river poorly
Rendered, poorly imagined, framed
Before they’d left their trailer at the airfield, ugly
And ugly, and bad. Behind the creamy
Vinyl siding in the new place, a nest
Of wasps seized and buzzed like an idling engine all day,
All night. Two birds in the black tin chimney
Needed letting out. I’m not tilling the rocky clay
For a few yellowed beans scrunched up, scattering
In the garden like snubbed-out
Cigarette butts, he thought, If even the pumpkins
Won’t take, what can I do? Last to arrive,
His father twanged a splinter on the dried-out railing
Like the tongue of a mouth harp, readjusting
The mesh-back hat over his thin hair. Not
Today, he thought. His father’s wife offered
The drooping aluminum pan of frank and
Beans up asking it be
Taken off her hands. I’ll
Take a little time, he thought, and eat.
The out-building shined its palish light,
So he remembered being a boy, the way
The basketball might pull off to one side,
Roll into the cold, dew-moistened grass
When it caught a big stone in the dirt driveway just right.
Plinking bugs were performing their loopy orbits,
Around the porch bulb in their dust-colored bodies.
That’s the biggest moth, he thought,
That I’ve ever seen.

Anthony Cudahy

T, oil on canvas, 26 x 18 inches, 2014