Boxing Day, 2020

Someone here is boring, in lakeside views. As if in foam-like memory, night must fall darker now. It’s always December here, the blue wash of streetlights will enter the room and unfurl

like conversation

while the toddler remains glued to the television screen.

Snow falls darker instead, muting the vocality of winter, of visible breath. Burning turkey like adhesive, the dendrological structure of familiarity blisters. As if tonight, but we have not, we might have considered the mapping of bloodlines. Here in the room where the floor annoys us with its very presence and its weight; we should tiptoe, we should pick and choose very carefully. I resort to saying nothing of value but have every syllable weighed by the counsel only to be unceremoniously disregarded as ramblings

as my dad is too busy swiping all the rights under the rug and my mother has diligently assumed her blindness.

It’s always December here, this close to the end. We scrape the ashes off our plates and ignore the bitter taste.

Please,

send my compliments to the chef. He has ruined my life.

Marije Bouduin is a Belgian writer living in Germany with her daughter. She believes in Jacques Derrida and the filmography of Andy Warhol. Her work has been previously published or is forthcoming in Posit Journal (2020), Allegory Ridge's Aurora Poetry Anthology (2021), the Oakland Review (2021) and The Vital Sparks (2021)