This spit-polished veneer has street appeal and is open for inspection. In

these shutter-speed days her family portraits bear the least resemblance to 
anything real, paintbox-bright statements, all flourishes and filters – tumbling

and spreading from the news feed’s mouth. And it’s the arrangement that is the 
most exhausting – the nipping and tucking, the painstaking placement; all that

sure-footed running with the bulls. What remains of her curls on the editing 
room floor, and it’s there that she exhales, stripped down to a wick – hauling

the dead weight of domestic bliss like a cadaver. There, she waits, tracing the 
panic room’s button with her finger, as her audience chatters and twitters with

with absent kindness – cutting her a break in digital platitudes; the emptiest of  
intimacies. It’s a fragile masking agent, enough to hold the moon at arm’s length

from the sleeping faces of her children; keep the dark sirens, doll-faced and 
dead-eyed from making their move – from clambering and twisting their way

out of her, as everything real is stuck, fishbone-cruel in her throat. It’s a complex 
deal to strike, and she wonders how it came down to this – all this keeping up

appearances – pasting papier mache strips across this perfect, terrible mess.