What does the bee do? Bring home honey. And what does Father do? Bring home money. And what does Mother do? Lay out the money. And what does baby do? Eat up the honey Christina Rossetti Minnie

our jowls crashing like cymbals, while my baby brother takes out his eight-ball left eye and squints his right to line up his shot on the world’s smallest pool table. Mother has a camera for a head; it flashes uncontrollably though she claims to have run out of film a hundred years ago, when father’s penis, an unstoppable spigot, became a garden sprinkler, contained by adult diapers, changed hourly, and hourly, my sister— shuffling out of her hiding place in the cuckoo clock, her hair a mess of paper clips, a Raggedy Ann doll in her arms—sighs to pass the time. Water seeps through the ceiling, because upstairs the bathtub overflows, for Grandma has forgotten the bath she’s drawn, and on the stove the gas is high, the flames are heating up a pudding over which my opa whispers: boil, boil, loyal rubble, follow me to the end of my life. by Christopher Shannon Minnie