Member-only story
The Nightly News
Jan 3, 2021
My kids have a culture all their own.
They’ve left me behind at the dinner table
conveying sentences with glance and laugh,
an idioglossia of eternal generations.
For the first years of their life, nothing
happened without permission. They don’t know
me either. I was here before them and will be
ages on the edge. They only see what I show;
not the hours on the couch; not the pillow talk
of politics and playfulness; not the combat
with a private voice behind my blank
dinner table stare. I mask it with presents
wrapped in pretty paper, a magician’s misdirection
— something to ignore, to open up instead.
© Trapper Markelz 2021
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