Throughout Joy Harjo’s, “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” the author uses small stanzas to display a different method in how the kitchen table has proven significant in the family’s lives. She uses opposite meanings to convey the different things that occur at the table. For example, “At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.” She speaks about thinking about the past with bad memories of the enemies and the good memories of people they’d loved but ending sadly. She emphasizes the significance of the table by letting us know how deep the convos and how broad the length of these conversations go. Joy Harjo emphasizes the end of the world as hopefully a bittersweet ending. In that hopefully, the end of the world occurs while they are all sitting around the table so it’s just a poetic ending for them.

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