Dinner Table

Day 71

The world begins at the kitchen table . . . It is here that children are given instructions on what it is to be human. We make men at it, we make women. 

-Joy Harjo, ‘Perhaps The World Ends Here’

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The first time I tried to make art about the dinner table was the fall of 2006. I had just started an MFA program, and I had brought into my first critique a two-by-four-foot painting. After the initial responses and a few technical questions answered, one of my peers asked me what inspired it, and what it was I wanted to communicate, and that’s when I realized I wasn’t prepared to talk about it. Didn’t want to. I hadn’t planned this in advance, but with all those eyes on me, the story behind the painting was too painful a secret, too embarrassing to name. All those eyes on me.

Sixteen years later, I approached it again, this time in the form of a poem.

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DINNER TABLE

We were all in our places.
My father complained about my mother’s cooking.
He shook a bottle of Tabasco over his plate 

without looking, as he reached with his right hand
for a thin aluminum pie pan, the disposable 1970s
TV dinner kind that my mother kept in the cupboard.

The pan swung out over our place settings and struck 
the left side of my mother’s face with a snare drum clap.
We all trembled in the glare of their red, enraged faces.

Monsters here. Our siren cries broke the tableau.
Only our tear-streaked faces held us together and
no one seemed able to disturb our careful arrangement,

to get up from our places at the table.
We were set that way.