My name is Podrick O'Tumour and what I love about poetry is that it's always trying to do a few things at once.

Sometimes the person is speaking in a poem, the eye.

Sometimes that person is really frustrated and annoyed and the idea is that when I'm reading that poem I can be brought along and feel like I'm on their side.

And I get them and I wouldn't make the same mistakes as the people who are annoying them.

But always in those poems too there's the invitation to consider it from the other side and to begin to realise, oh maybe I'm the one who's annoying that poet.

And maybe I wouldn't get it.

And that the poem itself is calling me into a new imagination of myself, especially when I face my realities.

I invite my parents to a dinner party by Chan Chan.

In the invitation I tell them for the 17th time, the fourth in writing, that I am gay.

In the invitation I include a picture of my boyfriend and write, you've met him two times, but this time you will ask him things other than can you pass the whatever.

You will ask him about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come. They sit at the table and ask my boyfriend the first of the conversation starters I slipped them upon arrival.

How is work going? I'm like the kid in home alone orchestrating every movement of a proper family as if a pair of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars as watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way. I pass my father a bowl of fish bowl soup. So comforting isn't it?

My mother smiles her best sitting with her son's boyfriend who was a boy smile.

I smile my hooray for doing a little better smile. Everyone eats soup.

Then my mother turns to me, whispers in Mandarin, is he coming with you for Thanksgiving?

My good friend is, and she wouldn't like this. I'm like the kid in home alone pulling on the string that makes my cardboard mother more motherly, except she is not cardboard.

She is already exceedingly my mother waiting for my answer. While my father opens up a Boston Globe when the invitation clearly stated no security blankets.

I'm like the kid in home alone except the home is my apartment and I'm much older and not alone and not the one who needs to learn has to remind me what's in that recipe again.

My boyfriend says to my mother, as though they have always easily talked.

As though no one has told him many times what a non-linear slapstick meets slasher flick meets psychological pit he is now co-starring in.

...