this is what I would say,
If I were your real mother–
Use the pink phone with the rubber buttons
the canned voice locked inside it
–May I help you? She would ask gamely
Each time you rang her up
She would
Drop everything
Just to hear your voice
At the other end of the line.
for seven years
in the back of my head
there has been a terrible
Terrible story
started a long time ago
When a 15 year old boy
hurt his little sister
(Bad)
and then…
Our paths separate at this point.
And I only know the story of the other 15 year-old-November-16-2009-boy
Because I talked about you, Charles, my-used-to-be-son
All the time
Until tonight I did not know your doppelgänger’s name–
Jamar Pinkney, Jr.
Or the queasy details
No, not the terribly private awful
…the public strange
—don’t call a child molester “Teddy Bear” or put his face on your t-shirt
Ask instead–
How in God’s name…
Is his little sister?
they say you should not
look directly
at the sun
ignoring the real possibility
that it is the night
that has already
blinded us
To the scared, cold,
Ordinary child
In each photograph
Owned by
This oddball monster
While the dying sun,
Claw-handed scribe, failing light,
Scribbles justicejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejusticejustice…justicejusticejustice
Into one kind of eternity
Or another
these stories we tell
of bartering children for the status quo
are older than the Minotaur
dark, iconic monster
who most resembles our complacency
As long as the child sent into the labyrinth is not my own
we mutter, a sotto voce offering
To the god of what it would cost to save them all
He, unlike the Minotaur, is a natty dresser
With advanced degrees and a split-level colonial
He tsk-tsks about the rising price of safety
Rams our collective shame into his artisanally-crafted
Italian briefcase
pets his children and standard
Poodle
with the same idle indifference
Ignoring the growing sport
Of hunting children
In the labyrinthine
minds of men who have traded
The suffering of this human child
For their own eternal
Souls.
you search for a word for this kind of thing–
boat lost at sea
balloon gone untethered
the appropriation of breakup
…songs
we used to sing as lullabies
now ectoplasmic
only you are the ghost in your own
skin
house
grief
rolls this monster
wave over you
grief-stricken mama
trapped inside this Chinese box
feel the wounds born into
each wrist
howl, howl, howl
hours before dark
the lines we draw in the sand
between alive and not as blurred
by these arbitrary atoms
configured into blood or bone
iterations of shell
crushed and altered by
lunar whim
the two abuelas lift la vieja
Under her
Right and left pits
she, swallowed up whole by the big
white shirt
all three women lay on hands,
Lean in
As we shield our eyes
Look up
Beneath the sun
the kite snaking ceaselessly over our heads
Paper-thin, it whips back and forth
Surely alive?
“Kite” is just
A name
Predatory bird with a haunting call
No more than a child’s toy
Perhaps we are all kites, then
The wind moves where it wills, but…
The old woman rises suddenly
Twine hastily tied to her waist
As the wind pulls her up
Those she loves
Upturn their faces
Squint to make her out
Paper-thin
Unspooling toward the sun
“Poem”
would be a
Beautiful name for a child
The kind of child
You must imagine with
Ringlet curls,
Head bent over a book
Or just the small legs dangling
From an open-armed tree
We forget that the word itself means
Create
Like fiction or the epic
Story of lost children
We created, engendered, if you will
Then destroyed
Through shear absence
Of imagination
You always used to say I was not
Your “real mom”
And I say,
“Tropes!”
What you really need to study are tropes.
For instance–
all the insinuating places
Fairy godmothers turn up:
(…Or in your case just your own lost-girl soul)
The forever, the divine, the set-free, the
Real girl you
Should recognize in the faces now of your own
Bewildered children.
(Wake up, sleeping beauty…wake up)
Only the best are chosen
to man this ship
Sinking
with its nuclear core
whether it is true or not
I picture the submarine, home in the deep
sea inexplicably punctuated by
Bits of blinking light
Windows, a wrap-around porch,
(entirely decorative) men
Tiny inside
Atoms knit of blood and bone
All the oceans of the world reduced
To a thimble full of water amidst the stars
This metal vessel,
This Berlin heart,
Resuscitate us, sinking fast
without You.
If tragedy is a long-shot and comedy is a close-up
Then what is the Facebook shot of a young mother slumped
Out cold over the body of her own
Wailing child
On a van
On the way
To the methadone clinic?
Carrying Light 