An Afternoon Spent with the In-laws

Oh, how they come at you with smiles hard as drill bits,
to look you over, the soft white curiosity you are --
all cotton, khaki and slender fingers that they when greeting you
clasp with blunt rough hands, making you feel
as if your hand is caught in coral.

They ask with small interest what you do, but you are speechless,
transfixed by the reflection of yourself in the dirty paneled mirror
that shows you to yourself in this very moment,
and you hear more the thoughts of you you imagine they’re thinking
than the words they’re speaking.

Thus you leave them with the impression that you,
already rather faggotty, do nothing but compose poetry indolently
while their poor daughtergranddaughter buries her promise behind a time-clock
in order to keep hearth and home together; though the fireplace, you remind them,
is strictly ornamental and you do teach to earn a wage most of the year.

You do go two months without a paycheck in the summer unless you can hustle,
scrape some work together that will allow you to escape
the reproachful glare she greets you with each day at the end of her shift
until you wish you could just live in a sewer and drink monsoon humidity

but you must have that new couch,
new media cabinet —
must in short live
as a tenured professor
though you’re still just a grad student.