Kharan Badri
Does This Spark Joy?
I.
How alien other people’s homes seem,
though near-identical to our own.
The framed photos of forebears peering
through the sepia-tinted past & of beloved
grandchildren smiling gap-toothed at
kindergarten graduations. Your parents’
wedding portrait bestride yours
—donning the same robin-blue dress as
your mother 30 years prior, twins in time.
II.
The same overfull bookshelves with titles
never read nor thumbed through.
They're intended to convey studied sophistication
—a liberal education, a progressive mind.
To imply you devour the latest advances in
philosophy, global affairs, meditative discourse,
contemporary poetry, self-care treatises,
heartwrenching memoirs from refugees fleeing war,
& the New York Times Best Sellers collections
of prose. All ample evidence of an
ink-stained finger on the pulse of pop culture
amidst a forest of classic literature leather-bound
& embossed, denoting the works of Nabokov,
Chaucer, Rabelais, Milton, Cervantes, Blake,
Voltaire, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
Joyce, Kafka, Eliot, Borges, & a
dozen more literary luminaries besides.
III.
Fingers crossed, nobody discovers you’ve only
ever spark-noted “Lolita” & inherited the set from
your great-aunt. A semi-famous hostess in
her day—her parties were well-attended by
the period's somewhat accomplished artists.
Yet, they were never the true geniuses or
polestars of the aesthetic zeitgeist.
IV.
The literary props sit upon rustic reclaimed wood,
maintaining the pretense of barn-dominium decor
in this cookie-cutter mid-century build in
the suburbs of your state’s fourth-largest metroplex.
The schools, amenities, & cuisine are all
a beat past passable. You feel bad for wanting
more from life when so many have so little
compared to your creature comforts.
V.
Still, the averageness makes your heart ache for
the greener grass in the state’s third-largest
metroplex. There, they don’t accept Groupons
at the Cheesecake Factory & have a supercute
drive-in-theatre that sells $14 glasses of wine
for Friday Date Nights Under The Lights to
parents who hire your niece & her friends
to babysit their children.
Those kids go to schools a bit bigger,
a few percentile points ahead on
standardized testing, a win or two more in
their high school football team’s column.
Their booster club outraises y’all by a couple
thousand dollars & drives midsize SUVs a year
newer than yours to homes with a tad more
square footage they say makes all
the difference in their families’ feng-shui.
You wonder if they’re right.
Is the energy more free-flowing
thanks to that extra 37sf & .03 acres of
a backyard where they fit in a tire swing on
which your overbooked niece pushes
those damned kids for hours as
the summer sun fades to dusk?
