Having Five Kids

A battered, fragmentary poem about the upheaval of suburban family life, where raising five children means moving out to the suburbs and losing something essential in the process.

A five-line miniature whose title, 'Having Five Kids,' presses its whole domestic weight onto a spare cosmic image: 'I've moved out / To the suburb of / a star, // And lost my / language.' The poem reads the founding of a large family as a kind of exile - a relocation so far out ('the suburb of a star') that the speaker can no longer speak his own tongue. The displacement is the point: parenthood at scale as a move past the edge of one's prior self.

The poem compresses enormous strain into deadpan understatement, letting the title supply the cause and the body supply only the effect. 'Suburb of a star' is a wry double move - suburban ordinariness fused with cosmic remoteness - so that having five children feels both utterly domestic and unimaginably far from where the speaker began. 'Lost my language' is the sharpest stroke: it names estrangement not as distance from others but as loss of the very medium of selfhood, the words one used before the household swallowed them. The stanza break isolates that loss so it lands alone. The source text is clean and brief; this reading rests directly on its five lines rather than on any OCR damage.