As If You Were a Prize

You know you had to have relied on them, your mom and dad –

though can’t recall much of it now. You dreamed last night

that you were crammed into a love seat with them, sitting

for a portrait: discomfiting because whenever you looked up

into their eyes, they didn’t look remotely like the mom and dad

you knew: they weren’t your parents’ shape and size nor had

their faces or panache: where were your father’s bushy eyebrows,

and extravagant moustache? Your mother’s elegant brown hair?

This simulacra pair of mom-and-dad belonged to who knows

whom: and yet, wedged next to them in that warm room, you

held hard to their forearms: and they affectionately kept you

in the middle, cozy on their laps and thighs, as if you were a prize –

quite the most important little human being ever born. Then you 
woke up, and wondered if to anyone that’s ever what you’d seemed 
or were. And though you didn't know that this would summon 
them, your dad and mom appeared like that – without a stir.

You kissed him, you kissed her.

.