I hope mommy is sleeping in heaven, she says
No. I say, she is dancing and singing in heaven
People don’t sleep in heaven
I wish I were in heaven she says
We have work here for now, I say. That is why we have God time–sing and dance
So we are ready for heaven
When it comes
The thing itself seems too big and awful–she liked to shoot up in the bathroom, the list of people who enabled her suggested a big bathroom
Why do this thing? Where do the needles come from? Where do they go after? Do heroin addicts have sharps containers?
I make the elements of the equation as simple as possible–
Keith died of it
Mary died of it
It must have been a doorway
Why do you walk through that doorway the first time?
What is through the doorway that is so compelling that you must go back–no matter what
What were they running from?
She tells the story as though they were just cooking bacon
Who lets a 4 year old cook bacon? Who lets a 4 year old watch a fire burn or find their own way floor to floor to grandma’s apartment?
Who falls asleep on the bus back from the methadone clinic
With a baby
My baby. My baby now
I cannot turn away
If x equals the thing you must have and y equals the way it makes you feel
Then they were simply bound to x because of y
Like sky or free diving
there is a rush
But this time, this thing, chained her to it, brooked all reason
in the blood and the brain you cannot undo
Alone
When Mary talks now on the Fisher-Price phone of loss, she speaks with a five year old’s falsetto. She is breezy, upbeat even, and we exchange pleasantries through the medium of her daughter’s voice.
Mary, the girls have your laugh, I try to tell her before the line cuts off. Mary, I always wanted to be your real mom, I tell her before the line clicks off. Mary, that last day haunts me. The girls talk as though you still have the giant carnival unicorn, as though you tucked it under your arm and carried it right through
The earth will soon dissolve like snow/The sun forebear to shine/But God who called me here below/will be forever mine
pretend you are a stranger and I am one of those uneven folk you meet at a coffee shop almost from the moment you sit down I have begun to tell this unraveling story about children left alone in a locked room for hours and a fire and a crooked judge, a baby filled with light and her mother, a figure unfairly edited out of all the relevant fairy tales who then ends up dying, not “poison apple” but poison nonetheless and when they come for her with all the accoutrements of salvation there is none left for her, no magic, no fairy godmother, no antidote as the EMTs say oh, it’s (only) Badamo…which is why I, this intrusive stranger, ramble on and on in the coffee shop jamming words into the dam of unrequited
Grief
they say her dress
obscured her face when they found her in the river
he as young as his eventual wife would be
when she went from girl to muse
muse is a tricky thing, Child
who never was a pipe
I inventory both the cause and the cure for addiction
The need, the proper remedy, the clouds white amidst blue in the cup of your head
Chose a different slumber
Not opioid, not heroin, not poison in the fruit or spindle, not locked in a room, not guarded by dragon
Medicinal sleep
Antiseptic reset, white coats, gently beeping monitors
Let the girl rest
Let her own dreams fell the dragon
So that when the spell is broken
The clouds and sky will spill out over her
Beautiful, fragile babies
Looks like deep
Sleep
Draped across the seat
across the bodies of these hungry
Children
Immobilizing poison
Shot into blood vessels, skin
I call to you, no answer
Try to warn you
This venal monster
Hunts then kills its prey
No answer, Sleeping Beauty
Already heroin gone
Who takes apples from strangers in a storm?
Do you believe in ever after?
All the tropes of fairy tales will not save us from
The story of a little girl trapped
In this worst kind
Of nightmare tries to call
for help
Nothing left
As the anatomical apparatus for sound and breath:
Lungs, rib cage, windpipe
Collapses beneath the weight,
The force of blows to this chest,
All alone,
Of the used-to-be
girl.
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