lost keys
from either a piano or home
signifying the way
music will wash
over us
even after
any pretense of ordinary living has
turned to furtive or else.
Science and the myths of gentle souls
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Category Archives: crime
Thin (Fake news:real girls)
After the 911 call, the sirens, the knocked-in door. After the 2-for-1 autopsy, the souping-out of ballistic shards in layers of mother, curls of child. After the sewing up, the tissue samples, temporary storage in this antiseptic place.
After this near-final totem of mother-and-child.
the cool and empty morgue fills with an emanation of light, softly cupped voices, perfumed flurry, fairy godmothers. A little late she thought as they scooped and coddled the baby-little late she thought as they lifted her from the crook of each bent elbow, inexplicably washed and free of blood. Here child, they murmur, try on this, try on that. Blur of organza and tulle.
After the day she’s had she goes along with all the fuss. Come on, child, carriage is waiting!
And there they all are bippity, boppity, boop! Apartment lot for courtyard, uncajolable vermin with no intention of donning livery or pulling pumpkins. No signs of princes.
Unfazed she realizes that even here, in the weird, magic-less limbo yonder, even here the grownups believe in magical fairytales..
which still end up
doing no good for the real girls
Living then dying
Alone.
Fake news for real girls
once there was a real girl
who (lucky for her)
Lived in a city with superhero dolphins
So when the humans she lived with began to
Bruise bones beneath skin
Pull out hair
Leave signs of trauma on shared walls
Well.. the
The magic dolphins of San Antonio
leapt to action!
Circled the child
Nudged her to safety
with their silvery, bottle-shaped snouts
Clicked and nodded their unequivocal attention to all
The days of her distress
Used their shear numbers to buoy her up
Brought her
bits of fish and garlands of seaweed
And in an unanimous decision
Ferried her to their own
blue, cool comparatively safe
Under-water-kingdom
far from the
city where these human mothers had
Failed her
Dissembling Wrong
So close
to a reclusive keeper
of memories, of wrongs
Shuffling among the forgotten objects
Placeholders for the barely living:
anonymous empty
water bottles, hollow and crumpled
Become the jury
Old newspapers still swaddled in
Their plastic rain protectors
Told to be
Witnesses or spectators
Instructed to rise
As a one-armed nutcracker assumes the bench
Rag doll court reporter records the proceedings
Mr. Vinegar prosecutes while
the defense attorney was appointed from among the
A pantheon of generic
Happy Meal toys.
But the victims are living songbirds
Twittering in the disheveled
cage of my heart of course
Always re-animating dried bones-
Off-kilter, neglected, wrongs
Will inexorably be
Radically, fundamentally transformed
When the true King
Calls them back
To life
Anger in the roses
your birthday falls
between the Ides of February and
pruning day for roses
when the master gardener
makes them sound so alive, so fragile, so human
the way you once were
Boy without words for the monsters
we all become without the Antidote
without the blood transfusion
without the interventionist God
Who somehow, ineluctably abides
this fallen terrible
world where children, babies even
grow up thinking both antichrist and apocalypse are normal
Whole time grown ups
Just shout the most destructive platitudes
into the shotgun corridor of
This unbearable
desolation.
Cry Fire
her voice is metallic-insistent-succinct
Fire! Fire! Fire!
Thank God she is there
10 dollar angel
suspended above us while we sleep
…when we sleep
You know it took me years to know You did that
And then years again to know few others did.
Vigilant love, calling us out of darkness
where angels who watch over us if we
had eyes to see
Always resemble the Firstborn
Fill the sky with light
Ring the children with wings and eyes
And teach them how to vanquish
Implacable darkness
with words of supplication
to the fierce Unstoppable
God of Light.
You and me on the old back porch
In an already messy old house
I try to find a place to stash my anger
The beat-up old chest?
Grandma’s dresser?
Each place I go I feel your loss
The way a tall boy once held a short girl at arm’s length
As she beat at the air with rage and sorrow
Maybe it is the air that is the problem…
Not enough oxygen?
The matrix of maternal affection somehow dislodged by
Something?
Something missing.
It is as though the lost girls had become those things-
A trunk, a cup, a worn blanket
Trapped in closets
…in the minds of monsters
The old childhood nightmare turned on its head-
The child in the closet
The mother, the monster
Shaking its imaginary head
“Even I could not
Would not
Do something so unspeakable
To a human child.”
Grace Packer, death by adoption?
When I was a foster parent in Beaver, PA in the late 1990s I was devastated to uncover adoptions going on in contravention of law and decency.
Some of the cases were covered by The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and 48 Hours. The ACLU sued the county.
The state did nothing.
One wonders if Grace Parker and her birth family were victims of the same kind of nefarious adoption scheme?
Horrible to think that the serious, maybe illegal actions of child welfare agencies are thoroughly shielded by confidentiality laws.
Even more horrible to think that Sara Packer may have used the federal money given to her to provide for Grace to buy the cat litter they used to disguise her murder.
Real Mom
i wrote it deliberately
the way it has been now to me
for over 20 years
and has been to the created
Universe
For as long as He can remember
Or rather just since that unfortunate incident in the Garden
“Biological mother” might have always been our deplorable undoing-
The willful choice
To pick death over Real Mom
Seems somewhat abstruse and vaguely epistemological
Until I tell you about the feral
cats of Universal City
one of whom, just a wee thing
had words with me last night
Sure, they were just
plaintive and insistent
Mewings in the parking lot
But we both know it was more than that
It was all of them
Hidden in the margins
Rightfully afraid of the humans who trashed the Garden
Looking for Real Mom
And yet so cold, so alone
so afraid to come home.
Lost girl
it is the details you wish
To unhear, unread, undo
the window into terrible
Opened by her own
biological mother
Who then had the wherewithal to
Shower
After she had baptized the child
The spun-glass-irretrievable little girl
In pain and blood
When she should have plaited
Flowers in her hair.
Carrying Light 