That rose, so pendulant and yellow, she glimpsed outside the kitchen window wasn’t from the slip her mother sent her with across the ocean,
Next year I will be a mouse. She squeezed my hand tighter. The school year was almost over and that day she had let
My hands are hot, heavy as plaster casts, useless. Don’t scratch. Dozing in and out of the room parents come and go like apparitions.
The policeman is here. I’m five in braids. The officer doesn’t see me. The landlady shook, shook, shook her dust mop over laundry my