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Sunday Dinner at Miss Rayello's South Carolina is caught in your throat. We gather between a lulling bass & the staccato of things unsaid, around the mahogany of your Sunday table. Your children live in the warm-wet place just beneath your tongue. A full-grown & simmering son, his world thirteen by fourteen, one hundred & eighty two square feet of instant replay: what he should have done. A ripe & denying daughter, her voice heavy with both Columbia's, full of accusation. & you, with loaded plate, push & pass between us, exist in the doorjamb between his madness & your guilt. & you, with checkbook full of never-good-enough-day-worker money, are rent & car repair & whim. 46 The quiet has amassed in the crevices of your pantry. Our migration quiets your moaning eyes. When all is ready we will hush, gather like antiqued pinched lace, burgeon with silence more noble than our psalms & muted amens, will consider, with each pass of the bowl, how it would be to cast off these refrains & speak harshly of forgiveness. 47 ...

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