Summer (A Prose Poem)

We sat alone, staring out at my family, basking in our own personal ignorance. Aunts threw glances. Grandma wrinkled her nose and turned away. Our pleasant smell must have set off her tender stomach, we told ourselves. We smiled in their general direction. A simple wave and quirk of the lips from my wife and I. We loved my family. Like Mark— my uncle with the IQ of Albert Einstein who used it to rob an auto parts store—he died of gangrene after two years in jail, or Aunt Sarah—the woman who spent the last few years of her mother’s life abusing her and embezzling the elderly woman’s life savings—bitch deserved what came to her, or my own grandfather—he knows which kid pulled the trigger during that school shooting back in ’98 but he won’t tell—kid owes him money. We stare down at the image before us: a crinkled paper stained with age. We imagine the flames licking the forms of my family in their wretched afterlives—the smoke thick with the scent of campfires and month old cigarettes.