Page 69
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A parenthood lyric in which the speaker moves 'to the suburb of / a star' and loses language while raising five children.
Domestic life is rendered as cosmic displacement: the suburb is both ordinary and astronomical. The broken phrasing around 'And lost my / language...' makes family responsibility feel like a migration away from articulate selfhood.
Under the block-capital title 'HAVING FIVE KIDS', the speaker reports in five short lines: 'I have moved out / To the suburb of / a star / And lost my / language...'.
The title supplies the cause and the poem the effect: raising a large family is pictured as relocation to a distant, suburban orbit, bright but far from the speaker's former life. The line breaks isolate 'a star' and 'language...', so the loss of words is enacted by the poem's own shrinking, trailing speech.