TABOO

by L. Roger Owens

In the evening of the day that negotiations

over the Strait of Hormuz threaten again to collapse

and Russian missiles kill seventeen souls

in Kyiv—we saw seven bodies still lying there, one

reporter says—the same day a progressive democrat

declares victory in a senate primary in Michigan,

the family of my daughter’s boyfriend joins us

for a game night. We’ve made brownies. They bring cookies,

peanut butter ones. Ice cream chills in the freezer.

The whole gang comes: mother, father, sister and her boyfriend

(who went to high school with my boys), younger cousin,

and the boyfriend himself, it goes without saying.

We sit in a circle in the family room like a shape poem,

our names prosodic when spoken,

the consonance of the v’s and m’s, hard g’s beat--

boxing; two r’s waltz together sweetly.

The game is one in which you prompt your teammates

to guess a word, but there are several you can’t say.

My word is banana, and five more are forbidden me:

fruit, peel, yellow, split, and bread. I make

banana bread whenever a family member returns home,

from college, say, or from a trip away

(something dead citizens of Kyiv will never do again).

“Welcome Home Banana Bread,” we’ve named it

in the family cookbook, and three bananas

are browning in the kitchen now, waiting to be smashed

into pancake batter. My teammates know none of this.

I yearn to say peel yellow fruit, and time runs out.

I alone decline crumbed cookie between my brownie

and ice cream, and while we spoon dessert

into our mouths, no one dares to speak

of the widening fiasco in the Middle East or allude

to human remains strewn among the streets of that great city,

its Golden Gate immortalized by Mussorgsky.

No one says, Thank God the centrist lost.

But you don’t mention these things, of course you don’t,

not when your families are gaming together for the first time—

you don’t. More ice cream, anyone?

 

L. Roger Owens teaches spirituality, ministry, and creative writing at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He is an MFA student at Ashland University.

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