In the Apartment I Share With My Cousin Who Hears Voices

In this poem the speaker describes living with a cousin who is refusing treatment for schizophrenia. The speaker's sense of physical and emotional risk is heightened, but also ebbs and flows while inhabiting a surreal and distorted domestic terrain in which the boundaries between the real and the imagined become less certain. The poem is bookended by the televisual movement out of (and then back into) the space of the broader society, while (in between) that public world's suspension is questioned and troubled in the site of the purportedly private home.