What the Shelter Kids Left Me

I cannot write them immortal,
Nor can I dream them perpetual
children.
Somewhere I can’t see them, they are growing
into sad-eyed secretaries and shrewd
negotiators, cramming
for their SAT’s in a Laundromat
behind a brown brick apartment.
Someday I will see her
browsing Sephora in a marble-halled mall,
manicure adorning the handle of a stroller…
won’t know her.
Someday I will hear him
lying to a hooker in a urine-rank alley,
tobacco-voice scraping over gaping wounds,
“Never had a mother,
but I bet she looked like you.”

All I have are names and blurry visions,
scenes that tiptoe
on the blunted edge
between memory and imagination.

I have Joshua, who every day wanted me
to measure the inches he’d sprouted overnight.
I see his crooked grin
and the tiny brown teddy he clutched to his heart,
the one he left in a corner of my office
when I left for the night.
He shuffled in the next morning, crumpled,
tear-stained cheeks and dumb
with grief, barely able to mumble
“... my bear....”
I see him cradled in a desk chair,
giggling while I read him Dr. Seuss.
His mother told me how sad he was
whenever my office door was closed.

I have Nathaniel, as I scrubbed
Silly Putty from the seams and frayed elastic
of his blue-jeans.
I see his chipmunk cheeks and blue eyes,
and his resilient stare; as Daddy howled and cussed
over Mommy's meth,
Nathaniel crashed Tonka Trucks together,
making sounds of destruction
through chapped lips and baby teeth.

I have Alicia, with her bony body
trembling in my lap,
and a bright baby blanket thrown over us;
the collar of my shirt clung with sweat
and yellow waves of heat stung my cheeks...
still, she shivered.
Her brown skin burned
against my worried fingertips
while her father walked the fifteen blocks for Tylenol
and paid with change.
Her natty braids were tucked against my chest,
chafing my chin every time she coughed.
The sticky bubbling of her breath chilled me
as fever chilled her.

I have Camila and her accented giggle,
“I like-a you!”
Cameras caught her once, alone
in the TV room, hand between her legs,
rubbing, rocking, moaning, and only six years old.
Love and hormones, pain, all tangled up
in blood-bursts spurting from her mother's face...
and big brother, sucking on sore knuckles.
He yanked Camila’s pigtails
and thrust himself upon her, panting and broken.
I see her pleated plaid skirt and a smile as wide as her face,
painted purple-blue for Halloween.

I have a hollow in my gut when, longing and alone, I wonder
where they are,
these and the ten dozen little faces
that flickered past my office door,
my memories of them worn smooth
with too much touch, but vivid still.
Would Joshua know my name
if we bumped elbows at a Safeway?
Has Camila's accent faded?

Does anything fade?

Self-Medication

Do you know how poetry heals
me? And how one day, I will come
into it, I will.
I will learn fear
of abstractions and clarity
of image
(fear and clarity go together, I guess)
and I will let honeyed snakes and crystals
slip
from behind my tongue,
some of which may heal
the world.
But please, until that day,
let it heal me
every time an angry man points
and says, “you!”
and every time a gentle man
does not.