Sunday Roast

Stop tearing your hair

you frightened child, young sad boy.

Pressure cooker meal is the thing you smell,

pressure cooker family you see and hear.

Household dysfunction, all things blowing up,

screams of parents bouncing off the kitchen’s walls

and you sob as you rock madly

back and forth within your invented universe,

with the  pressure cooker whistle all around you.

Yours, they shriek, blaming each other,

just admit it this time, your fault, they howl

under this roof beside the metal stove. 

Then all noise ceases at once.

You wake from this shrill dream.

Please, come sit,

The family is broken still, but hungry.

Afterthoughts for "Sunday Roast"

Memory is not particularly linear - it is associative, repetitive, subjective and porous. 

But the writer needs to convey disorder and dysfunction without making the novel 

itself disorderly or dysfunctional. 

Dana Spiotta

I want kids to have a chance to dream of becoming something like I did in my life, 

and when you're living in a home that's dysfunctional and unhealthy that way, you 

don't dream like that. 

Picabo Street

Tell the negative committee that meets inside your head to sit down and shut up.

Ann Bradford

My Drawing: