You order everything into a family,
even your collection of toothbrushes
have been given responsibilities
as parents and a baby
an uncle and an aunt.
And when you watch the news
at your granny’s house,
you refuse to accept
that the newscasters are not
the mom and the dad
even though the woman who does the weather
sort of throws you off.
I’m tempted to tell you
that I never had a dad
just to see how your brain,
so confident and strict,
would fit it in.
I would tell you that it was fine,
that it is like
pitying a Hawaiian
for not knowing snow.
But I don’t have the heart right now
to make you imagine
a world without your own dad.
He is sewn so tight
into your orderly world,
it would be like telling the air
about heaviness,
like telling the rain
there are children dying
of thirst.