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?
In Plain Sight
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Category Archives: parenting
Reflect the sky
some things remain dark
Obsidian dark
No matter how much you try to put distance between
The two of us
The video footage cannot, will not excise your presence
Obsidian dark
Is not your chicken-scratch handwriting
The horrible story I made you write down
Or the things you left out…
That so many people helped to…diminish
None more than you
The damage which will always be
dead dog on my chest
Ghosts of dogs should haunt us both
But let yours bark incessantly outside the grainy film of your transgressions
While mine
Returns whole, resurrected even,
To the cement driveway by the old house where the children played with the water hose and the blue plastic wading pool
Joy
They fill the screen with joy
For a moment even you could see
The way the thinnest layer of water poured out on rough cement
Reflects the sky
Reflects the light from the endless sky
Reflects the glory of this endless day we
…walk toward the sun, my one-time-child
Before the night
Falls forever
Quest
gone too long
A litany of good-byes
Signifying everything
We want from Light
The shapes of letters resemble
Hands raised in supplication
Bottomless things
Somewhere in between I find you
In the story you beg me not to tell
Even though you are the hero of it
The boy who quietly
Saves the headstrong girl
From so many foolish choices
Hey Miss Veronica
When I first saw Finding Nemo it was so much about you.
And after all these years, Finding Dory is much the same.
I may have been your brief and most arbitrary mama, but I will love you forever.
And your foster dad and I will never stop laying down the shells…not just for your way back to us, but as a mosaic for how you changed us forever.
You, beautiful girl.
The Comfort Machine
by then their civilization had evolved to ruthless efficiency
Injustice and oppression had been outsourced to less developed countries
Leaving them only to
Eradicate grief
They tried all the usual suspects–
Hot tea, warm milk, kittens
Yet the mothers still grieved
So “They”
Invited the white coats to come
Put their heads together,
build the perfect
Comfort machine.
It worked of course, they were prone not to failure
As they stood at the scene of each tragedy
Bystanders on the side
…the Comfort Machine churned out its magic
Combed out the violence
scrubbed the murder
Bleached out the violation
Unthreaded both deceit and apathy
Established a perimeter of fire
Around self-preservation
Passed a final round of shots
Among the dignitaries-
Bone bourbon, tequila, absinthe
They murmured in approval the way a barkeep might shout
Last call
As the music continued to pulse hard and fast through the crowd
Everyone turned
To the mothers for some final sign it had worked
As the Comfort Machine idled and purred
Over the still deafening sound
Of silenced hearts
Serenity at the dollar store
Her grandmother holds several objects close to her bosom as they make their way to the front of the store.
Serenity asks for a balloon.
Grandmother asks, do you want the balloon or the play-doh?
Play-doh, Serenity replies.
Behind them in line, I ask if I can buy her the balloon? (In honor of some young women I love who used to be the Serenities of the world, all grownup now.)
Serenity’s grandmother agrees.
Yet after briefly snagging a balloon, Serenity puts it back.
You don’t want it?
No, she replies, we are going to the park and it will fly away.
We inventory other possibilities–a two-headed dragon?
Nope. One too many heads.
A bag of plastic dinos? Yes but only this one, and this one, and this one.
So efficient, young Serenity. I give her 30 cents worth of plastic.
She gives me joy.
Don’t look back
in my head
I sing off-key
Pick through the rocks
On the steep uphill
Dark of course
Avoid the fruit
They say
I long to look
Behind me
Willing you be there still
As though a woman of no particular gifts
Could summon the missing
With scraps of broken notes
Strung together
Legal
It has troubled me for some time that in Texas people are legally allowed to kill human beings and use their tiny, defenseless body parts for “science.”
But the two people with the courage to infiltrate and expose this science-fiction level atrocity were indicted by a Harris County grand jury for using fake IDs.
So to recap–fetus harvesting: legal
Fake IDs: a big deal
Or are they?
I spend way too much time listening to Texas teens brag about their fake driver’s licenses to believe that we in Texas are suddenly cracking down on forged driver’s licenses.
In fact, I wish we were.
But in the case against the brave people from The Center for Medical Progress the prosecution is selective, punitive, and political.
In fact, one has to wonder how many of the grand jurors in this case have ever owned or used a fake ID? How many of their children are using them now?
These are far simpler, easier questions to ask than how many Texas mothers have allowed their own children to be carved up, evacuated from their wombs, then bought for “science” while the rest of us hide behind the now meaningless phrase “everything they did was legal.”
In Texas.
Out of body
the car crash in slow motion
The snake coiled to strike the child
The mother seeing bad news
In the doctor’s eyes
Some moments are so unforgettably awful
The spirit rises out
Of the body, off to one side
Hovers over the disaster
Snapping shots of all the carnage
A heart just beginning to break
Operates differently than
One far gone into the cave of grief
the last evening you were mine
Was the first time you met
Your new mommy, new daddy
Strangers then
You were delivered back to me
Sleeping I sat with you in my arms
Time folded around us
Everything paused
For our unlikely pieta
I had just enough sense
to stop everything
just to be with you
A little longer
The Girl in the picture
haunts me with her gray
Soul, robbed of light
Too young to ever choose this
She is a ghost
Who in all other aspects
Resembles me–
Breastplate taken in battle.
Which is why I see your face before
Me always
The iron bars invisible to all but
We two
Jailed by men with carved out hearts
I carry you, darling
Close to my own
Beg the God of air and light
To teach us how
To fly
Away from the shadows
Where ordinary humans claw and devour
All but unaware
They have bartered their own
Nearly extinguished
Eternal selves
For shreds of ashen dung
Carrying Light 