There Is No Grace
There is cranberry sauce somewhere
Three dimes in my left hand
An eight of spades in my right
My mother
Is making nervous conversation
The relatives
Are too old to care
I am looking anywhere but the lines on all of these faces
The conversation moves on, I don’t follow it
I win the next few rounds and
It is when I see my father grimace I really listen
Some other relative is talking about the homeless in their
Freezing state of Minnesota
Except they call them other things instead
Question why they don’t just ‘get a job’
Someone
Chimes in with ‘they must be lazy or something’
Says God must want them to suffer
My grandmother is what I call ignorant and she calls catholic
I lose another dime because i’ve stopped paying attention to
The game
I am too busy texting my boyfriend whom my grandparents remembered as
‘Mexican’ then ‘painter’ and then ‘whats his name’
He is so much more beautiful than anything either one of us could create
The conversation still revolves around street corner statues
I am feeling less and less alive with each word and more and more suffocated with each second of silence
Every time my brow furrows and mouth opens my mother hurriedly asks me
If I’d like more apple pie
To which I quietly respond ‘I've had enough apple pie family for the rest of my life’
There is nothing thankful about harassing people with no voice
There is no grace in this conversation
I mutter to my brother something about god creating the rainbow, and street corners, and laughter, and anything that is not white picket fences, anywhere that is not the suburbs
He says ‘Amen sister’
The longer I sit here the more the walls look like they are closing in
I go open the garage door just to feel the light on my skin
I do not belong in this cage
They ate the only other thing with wings in this house
And although I do not believe in God I know some hold him like a gun filled with blanks and others have passionate affairs with faith
And although I do not know what it is like to be home-less
I do know what it is like to be homeless.
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