The left-over turkey is lodged a thousand miles

from here in the refrigerator of the house that my

son and his girlfriend bought back in June, to the

delight of both sets of parents, anticipating as we did

that something momentous would soon follow,

like an engagement or a wedding.

But we are boomers, that odd generation spawned

when the appearance of global peace beguiled our

parents into reproducing in record numbers; rather

like rabbits, some might say, as though a house full

of kids could stabilize the psychic careen wrought by

Part Two of the World War.

We grew up on a thick stew of things they didn’t have;

straight teeth and television, finished basements, electric

dryers, air conditioning, telephones with extension cords,

second cars and possibility, and yet there was so much

of the hows and whys of their lives that we didn’t want

them to pass along to us.

We took on neighborliness, but not the concern for what

they thought of us or the worry over who they were. We

honored faith, but church was not our axis, and the

sanctity of place was lost on us as we moved far enough to

keep their traditions from influencing our creation of what

we thought were better ways.

Little did we know that in teaching our children to think

like us we also taught them distance and difference, and they

choose not to marry like us or settle like us, or hold their ends

of the cord like us, the one that goes all the way back to Eden

and runs us all through, and God knows, I have prayed that

their rebellion would be a tighter grip.

I didn’t call my Father on Thanksgiving. Perhaps it’s not too late.

© Dana Hughes 11.29.16

The morning after the election when my lungs refused

to inflate,

I saw that I was phosphorescing like a jellyfish, a pulsing

blob of white in a sea of diffuse uncertainty in which

the slenderest slivers of light above the seething calm

were inked out as thousands expelled jets of black

and brown to cloak their shape and confuse the

hunter enticed to these waters by the need to

feed on disparity, to seize and devour even

the shadows to which the tremulous flee

and pray for protection that might not

come in time if it comes at all.

Within the murk now thick with dread, the murmuration

of innocents becomes a mass for the dead, a lament

weary of sundered assurances and hope’s demise,

and well below where worm-scarred timbers lie

amid bones of other others lost or tossed to the

deep and long since adapted to the lack of air,

wide dark eyes mark the flailing above and

unhinged jaws form a soundless sigh of

empathy ascending, for they know

the price of difference will

always be paid.

© Dana Hughes 11.24.16