Do You Want Popcorn?
Do you ever notice how some people walk around
with Little Orphan Annie eyes dull metal the size of half dollars?
What can they see through those things anyway?
Sometimes I feel like we’re inside a one-movie world
and the only thing streaming is Night of the Living Dead.
Ode to the Perfect Family
After “American Happiness” by Jacqueline Allen Trimble
It never rained in Studio City, California.
Tears, misunderstandings and heartbreak
resolved in under 30 minutes.
Missing fathers: no explanations.
Who needs a biological daddy
when Mike Brady is in the house?
What a house it was, too, designed by
an architect-father who never lost his cool,
got drunk, beat his wife, or spanked the kids.
No, Mike Brady never placed his hands
where they didn’t belong, and we’re not talking
housekeeper Alice’s cookie jar.
Didn’t every fatherless child in America,
and every child with a monster-father,
yearn for such a man of the house?
Didn’t every child long for a mother like Carol Brady,
such a lovely lady? And didn’t our own going crazy
stay-at-home mothers covet a housekeeper like Alice?
Three boys and three girls, brothers
and sisters by marriage, living together in
mostly perfect harmony under one roof.
In an early episode, Carol laid it on the line:
The only steps in this house, said our TV mom,
lead upstairs.
Each week we sat in front of the TV screen’s
tic-tac-toe of Hollywood smiles.
For 30 minutes we shut out the comings
and goings in our own home by stepping
inside the Paramount set to pretend
we were one of them.
For 30 minutes, this was our family.
We had no series spin-off worries where
brothers would maim or be maimed, kill or die,
in Vietnam. For 30 minutes, no need to hide
in our bedrooms, chairback braced beneath the doorknob,
when our mother’s creepy boyfriend babysat.
Our real-life mother said about us: Never
call one another half— after some adult
tried to sketch out our family tree.
Each of us born to a different father,
all three men absent. How were we kids
to know whether it was DNA or circumstance
that made the youngest child explode in rages
or hammer a hole in the locked bathroom door?
Robin Michel (she, her, hers) is a writer and poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boudin, The MacGuffin, Prime Number, San Pedro River Review, Sport Literate, Unbroken, Wordpeace and elsewhere. Her work has also been anthologized in Women in a Golden State (Gunpowder Press, 2025), Storms of the Inland Seas (Shanti Arts, 2022), and she is the author of Beneath the Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press, 2023). She lives, writes, and resists in San Francisco.
The Marbled Sigh 