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.

The OCR damage is so severe it becomes part of the meaning — 'Having Five Kids' barely survives the page, just as the speaker barely survives the move to the suburb of a star. What can be read through the wreckage is a poem about loss: having moved out, having lost something the broken text will not let us recover. The fragment performs what parenthood at scale feels like — overwhelmed, comic, half-illegible.