The stove doesn’t work. The food is painted
on the refrigerator door. No stairs join
the three levels, and the residents flit
between them, colorful, mute birds. Days
pass with the click of a switch and no matter
if Baby bathes with his clothes on, or Mother
in her fitted purple jacket, heeled shoes,
and with her wild silken hair spends a week
face-down on the laundry room floor, or
if when Father goes to work he is really only
waiting behind the sunroom to come back home.
There is a birthday party nearly every day,
no fear of death or failure, no mortgage
to pay, no money at all. And if the tiny pink
phone in the kitchen never rings, and the doors
don’t open, and if the family can’t bend
their knees to kneel in the warm square of light
on the plastic-wood floor, they are still
ready for you to set the table, snap the garden
fence back into place, position the pink crib
next to the blue, fix the girl onto her rocking horse,
and let your hand push the thing until it topples.