Affinal relatives were everywhere, all kinds
Of fictive kin. Belonging was a metaphor
With overlapping layers we all nestled in.
Forgive me, incapable of almost anything,
For thinking you might want me to explain.
The metaphor of the individual in the single
Body, the identity relation, patrolled
By proprioception, was one place to begin,
And then the father and daughter pairing,
Granddaughter and maternal grandmother,
Grandmother and her husband, beginning
To stretch thin the biological metaphor
Of generational descent, the other tables
With their own arrangements of family
And friends, the occasional acquaintances
Temporarily holiday-adopted in, beyond them
The whole restaurant, a system of roles
And functions, a team, locally well known
For pies, especially at Thanksgiving, when
Literally tens of thousands of them were sold
From this location in the course of one long
Weekend, the pies themselves becoming
A tradition, a kind of identification, organized
And sold from tents outside, long lines
In the parking lot, itself a part of a system
Of boundaries, outside and in, also the city,
A thing to belong to, also the Beehive State,
The hegemonic nation state, the state
Of being in this era of technology, the state
Of being human, caring about belonging,
Comforted by caring, caring about these things.
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