tv dinner redux 

i come home from a bullet hole. 
don't tell me what to say. there are
self-driving cars taking children 
to the moon. i am told that on the next planet
there will be days where we all lay down
& stare at the sky. point & say,
"that is where we came from." the earth
a marble in the soup. a bean in the water.
i cannot help but love tv dinners. their poetry
is a family apparatus. here we are smiling.
here we are camering. there is something
wrong with me because when i lose my phone
it feels like losing a limb. where is my tongue?
where is the little god telling me
how & what i should want to taste?
a brownie to sleep on. mac & cheese. 
one square reserved for the ancestors.
my grandfather sets his cane down 
against the plastic wall of our cell.
the bocks of the tv dinner could be 
playpens or they could be kennels 
or they could be prisons. in this country
we are all different levels of prison nesting dolls.
i tell my friend "we are in a crisis of dreaming"
& then here i am dreaming about
a microwave thanksgiving dinner.
when i was anorexic in high school i used
to look at the turkey on the cover
of this one tv dinner & imagine them
as waves ready to engulf me. hunger is 
horrible. hunger is beautiful. 
if you cage a hunger that is how you get
a disciple. i do not want to be a disciple. 
i open the microwave like a sacristy. 
a world of altars. what is & isn't witchcraft
really just depends on who is holding
the mirror. as a child i did plenty 
of microwave sorcery. once summoned 
a mouth that craved nothing.
buried it beneath the pine tree. put my 
ear sometimes to the earth & it would
talk to me. it would say, "puncture 
the plastic seal."