Happy Families

-Jané Fourie

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oh, you happy families, your self-same joy, its simplicity. through separations and pretense, late nights, slit wrists, accidental babies, impulsive loves, happy families stay the course. I envy them so - a chartreuse taste that always sticks in the caw. look at all your hands, your open arms, how firm they grip each other, how you are enveloped. here's the blonde one at three gripping the centenarian by the finger: look at us, bookends to a helix, seed and fertile soil - up, up, I want to be picked up. oh, happy families are easy to spot, look: they laugh with heads thrown back. look- they do not hide. see here, they gather freely, they feed each other love with long spoons, they hug twice when they leave. I envy them so, their bare feet, bare souls, the stories they already share like treasured phantoms, kept breathing in the voice of another. they are scorched days that only ever end in stars and laughter. they are the drawing- towards. they are unguarded hearts, shallow pools, friendly spiderwebs - where you choose to be tangled; where you want to stay.