When is a dining table not a table?

Around the kitchen table
all the chairs are tucked in,
unused, except for the cat
resting there.

The surface is buried
under this and that:
unopened mail, remnants
of holidays past.

Now mostly a repository
for everything:
a place keeper, a war zone,
a waiting room for mail
or groceries or whatever
might be passing through.

No family gathers here
and hasn’t done for years—
the lingering fear of shared breath,
the cloud of shared trauma.

At this table no one lingers,
each cocooned in our own drama.

*

Betsy Mars is a prize-winning poet, photographer, and assistant editor at Gyroscope Review. Her poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Recent poems can be found in Minyan, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily. Her photos have appeared online and in print, including one which served as the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge prompt in 2019. She has two books, Alinea, and her most recent, co-written with Alan Walowitz, In the Muddle of the Night. In addition, she also frequently collaborates with San Diego artist Judith Christensen, most recently on an installation entitled “Mapping Our Future Selves.”