I just read your story about foster care.
I don’t think that you are ever too old to really find a family, really get adopted.
Don’t give up sounds trite and doesn’t pay the bills.
But I am here…maybe a little better?
Here if you need me.
E.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
at the edge of the edge of the silver dance
the stuff of space becomes so attenuated that
a single floating atom
cannot see the ghost mama
(because there is, by definition, nothing there)
Yet she is.
Curled around her lone, fetal darling
So much smaller than a human
blastocyst
Just a nucleus, protons, the usual electrons
Would be panicky lonely
Except for the unseen but still
so present
Modern ghost.
having lost the ancient word for fire, underestimate it into neat concentric squares folded, shelved and forgotten next to ugly Christmas sweaters, baby pictures, and odd clay art projects of now-adult progeny
Neglect means nothing to it, coiled, implacable, unfazed by short and mortal attention spans
Let the last leaf fall but…
Do not neglect the sun
Content for now to burn
At a safe distance
Until the day it will unhinge from invisible moorings and float
Balloon-like Beauty towards us
Suddenly, immaculately attentive
To this nakedness before impending fire.
Crowded city, lonely manger
Tired little mama so close
to the house of bread
You tell me the story of
tokens we substitute for transubstantiation
Exchanging trinkets for the
Stuff of life (everlasting)
or looking for the little clues-
“The ones who still hold on”
So very far from home
He knows you
try to pull a fast one
Child with the big words
In his eyes
Calls your bluff
I know you love Christmas!
Light is no ordinary word when spoken
In the dark
Commanding songs of rescue from the sleep-deprived
Who ponder why
Gold…frankincense…myrrh
gifts for the
Master-builder
Who makes a transom from a cross.
What we saw was
the pudgy placeholder for the law
In his uniform, high alert
gun drawn at the suspects
Through the bullhorn they hear the same grim warnings:
Put your hands up
Don’t turn around
Walk slowly to me
Pantomime of imminent demise
The laws of physics make the same demands:
Put your hands up…don’t turn around…walk slowly to
The pantomime of imminent demise
Twenty years ago the doctors never read me
The Miranda Rights of motherhood
About the presence or absence of DNA
Arms, feet, a face on the ultrasound they never let me see
Swimming in the dark
Pebbles with new names
Ask God for answers
Hands up…don’t turn around…walk back…
Was this child real enough?
He prophesies
children from stones
Not unlike dragon teeth
Heart pierced through
So we can all come home
By nightfall.
I squint to the horizon of “us”
To see you
gazing each day at
The thumbprints of eternity
Finding only
autonomic dopplering
Morse code for G-O-D
While I, all dervish need
Lean my head against
His broken chest
Hear the beating heart of God
Shout so loud
A pitchy song of adoration
At the center of this
Expanding infinite:
Skies, scars, planets, constellations,
Pulsars, telemetry, metonymy
All portmanteaus for
Leaves in early winter shook loose from the hair of the mother tree
lighthouses fixed to a rocky shore
Amidst inkwell seas
We bob in the dark
Fixed points of light
Carrying Light 