Page 69
By Jack Joseph Smith
HAVING FIVE KIDS
I have moved out
To the suburb of
a star
And lost my
language...
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.
'Having Five Kids': moved to the suburb of a star and lost language.
The poem reads like a three-act drama compressed into five lines. 'Suburb of a star' is the figure — fame as residential geography. Language is the inevitable casualty of the move, and the poem's own brevity is how the loss sounds.