Jake Reynolds

content note: allusion to murder

E (know)          I’m so jealous of the families who

                           can just switch off as the tale-telling starts. 

                           Those who serve veg in family heirlooms

                           with steel serving spoons, and leave them to steam

                           until they sweat off, linger, and go cold.

                           I love their unjust contracts: chat to me

                           and I’ll dry. Luxury disagreements

                           every week regarding communal

                           mealtimes. The decadence of a table

                           with a takeaway menu folded in

                           a tight wedge jammed beneath a leg so that

                           glasses don’t rattle as we take the days

                           from each other and carve them all up, cack-

                           handed, then protest: I don’t want us to

                           argue! Let’s make up! I want us all to

                           get along! Like, fine. I’m here. And I know

                           that I’d hate myself for wishing for it.

                           I’ve filibustered my way through pomp and

                           now I have to attend to it. I’m a

                           fraud with an active listener.

                                                                                Gravy.

O (alright)        Always pooled in mounds of mash, that smell I

                           know from childhood. With our forks we scraped peaks

                           into palaces, but we had to tear

                           them down—the moat would always burst its banks

                           and drown the cowards, no relief from slits

                           for arrows, no narrative or justice

                           for unfounded anger. All deleted.

E (sweep)         The clock won’t stop spinning. Clocks blow my mind.

                           I’ve been angry almost all of the time

                           at everyone telling me I’m angry.

                           I go to reflect, but not before you

                           lollop onto the tracks, jangling a bunch

                           of keys like you know what they’re for — like this

                           place is yours — unannounced like a fatal

                           twinge, or landlord. And then you chastise me

                           for frowning. For so many years I’ve been

                           treading dark water, in charge of a web

                           of leads. You rest up — I wake in cold sweats.

O (well)            I climbed from the pit of my own malaise

                           and the world became my loft bed and desk.

E (erm)             The world’s your room for wrappers and packets.

                           You still have the scar from bolting too quick.

                           It’s settled like solder into its groove;

                           a mark of your childhood, charm pink and smooth.

***

E (testing)        Ours was the home classmates said smelled funny.

                           Spiders smushed on the walls, smudges of tapped

                           ash everywhere, slack beanbags on the 

                           floor like ablated corpses. We knew to

                           wash beans and lentils, but never the start

                           to finish of any useful process.

                           Scraps toward something worthwhile. Fools’ errands.

                           These days I miss that uselessness. I miss

                           my life as a cog. Everyone acts like

                           I’m boiling over, but they never leave.

                           Instead they walk around me like this house,

                           old-boned, might reveal them. The very first

                           time I recall seeing my own image

                           reflected back at me, I was playing

                           by a creek on a morning without wind.

                           I pushed one eye until it reached its give,

                           went lazy, and saw a double vision 

                           of myself. We both spoke in the same way,

                           but before I’d unplugged my bony knees

                           from the suck of the muddy bank, they both

                           left me there. Reeds buffered invisibly,

                           humming to an indifferent current.

                           I know what my reflections have been up

                           to since that day, and salute vicious shoots

                           of pain for the sake of the twin process,

                           the endgame. I returned as a nuisance

                           years later, but the water had clouded

                           into grey, too filthy to see a thing.

                           The last time I checked, there was only a

                           gulch. So, dear house, I have abandoned my

                           selves, and with them their capabilities. 

                           The boards contract and crack. Now the two of

                           us are back in a tableau of my youth,

                           I sense you seething, playing tricks on me.

O (struggle)     That’s better. Do you think I’m a coward?

E (flat)               I think we’re just predisposed to drama.

O (snag)           Predetermined (that’s my education).

                           Look elsewhere. Let’s forfeit the theatre

                           of an extravagant meal, this second

                           helping of torture. Why is it so us

                           to make such an adjournment in fear of

                           our stresses? Why should we manufacture

                           an occasion? Do we like pain or what?

                           I say get it done. I know you think I’m

                           brutish, or giddy for blood, but this knife

                           is just a totem. It’s my figurine.

E (more fool)  Having eaten—though I know we haven’t,

                           yet—you’d bolt, then complain that your escape

                           was scuppered by a stitch. I know the thought

                           attracts you. But without me you would be

                           limping as they closed in: SWAT teams, choppers,

                           the lot. If food goes cold I couldn’t care

                           less. It’s the being seen that matters. I

                           demand, at least, that we are seen by both.

O (closed)        Perversely, I could eat.

is a poet from Lincoln, currently studying for a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. His research concerns the first-person plural, antipopulist poetics, and the late works of John Ashbery.

Two of Us: Electra & Orestes is a loose retelling of Euripides's Electra, a duologue poem between siblings Electra and Orestes, as they prepare to murder their mother and stepfather under the guise of an extravagant banquet. The action takes place in the family kitchen, the parents asleep upstairs.