Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: Even Though

Even Though is a title of a fine novel written by Michelle Latiolais, a novel about family and loss and guilt and with a protagonist named Lisa – well, Rebel Girl may just take it off her shelf and carry up into the mountains where she'll spend most of this week with family and loss and guilt – and yes, occasional moments of love, redemption and black olives.

Even though Rebel Girl doesn't care for John Updike nearly as much as everyone else, she offers him and his poem "Relatives" as part of her Thanksgiving week offering. Recent events (!) have left her pretty much wordless so she will renew herself this week by giving loyal Dissent readers other people's words to read and thus uphold the stereotype of mild-mannered professor of English in the process.

Relatives – John Updike

Just the thought of them makes your jawbone ache:
those turkey dinners, those holidays with
the air around the woodstove baked to a stupor,
and Aunt Lil's tablecloth stained by her girlhood's gravy.
A doggy wordless wisdom whimpers from
your uncles' collected eyes; their very jokes
creak with genetic sorrow, a strain
of common heritage that hurts the gut.

Sheer boredom and fascination! A spidering
of chromosomes webs even the infants in
and holds us fast around the spread
of rotting food, of too-sweet pie.
The cousins buzz, the nephews crawl;
to love one's self is to love them all.


~RB