I think of my parents living through it,
spaghetti with home-grown tomatoes for dinner,
an egg for breakfast. Downturn, slump.
I feel it in my stomach, hollow, hole,
concavity, dent, lack of roundness,
off-kilter sphere. There are pills for it
of course, they smooth out the sharp shards
at the bottom of the dent, but the declivity
is still there. “Hard times,” my grandfather
said. They lived mostly on the kitchen
garden. Preserves. I saw the jewels of their jars
shining on basement shelves. Slowdown. Standstill.
I have the megrims. There is a crater
in the macrocosm, nothing
is filling it up.
Janet McCann is a Texas crone poet who is retired from Texas A&M University.
Serotonin 