Bart Wilcox
Nuclear Family
2025, Acrylic on canvas, 16″ x 20″

The mushrooms in Mother’s casserole did not suck the ashes of a Japanese city into the stratosphere not literally but as sacrament they served and Campbell’s thrived we shrived to easy listening altars of Tennessee Earnie Ford Fairlaine fins we the members of the kiddy cabinet grew from repeated exposure to the term millionaire and in those impossible reaches knockoff colas grew on trees and TV dinner entrees we gobbled and scraped like inmates scraping gulag goulash before the Buddhists and the Beatles records burned you could stack them high like flattened Packards on the tracks to the scrap yard until no more fit beneath the arm and they would drop and explode under the scrawling needle as rude as a nailhead a midair burst Buddy Who? until the last one that would play over and over all night desperate long wanting if you let it. Mother and daddy might dance when mother put out the good stuff I think we were part martini from gold-rimmed glasses daddy won after the lower case war selling insurance to refugees from the mushroom that grows in our minds from the mother shroom obliterating Pacific islands like shrimp on the grill how we made the shadows in Hiroshima our test pattern.