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The Lonely Child
Acrid and lonely, little girl,
running down one street and up another
toes like crow wings, beetle juice, and charcoal
framed in the sun, hiding from the children
in weeds and bushes, your eyes
follow the streams of spit bubbles
and trash floating down the river’s
bright and glistening muck, sun disguising
its depths, and fingers of currents like
lullabies in your bones,
your bones of ripe fruit.
The pollen and sticky bees
that crowded your life’s little bud
sting like summer’s shock of cold hose water
on sunburned skin, but you stand still
and laugh at nothing, your laugh
a well of strangeness.
Acrid and lonely, little girl,
the stars that formed you
splintered into rain-ripped sheets of light,
like a few thorns in the baby evergreen,
and sometimes, looking into you,
all the world was Andromeda,
Venus, Orion, Pleiades.
Look over the shoulder of time—
you’re here as a guest, six, a nose-picker,
seated in children’s church for badges
and making little mud pies
with your dark and understanding words,
like a curtain pulled across the angry neighbors’ window.
A summer’s day is too hot to throw rocks,
sell love and chicken-hearts, lick cotton candy,
and throw tiny firecrackers everywhere
in explosions of powdery paper
like the sunflower seed shells,
salted from your lips, a trail on the sidewalk,
where we dream of our birthday parties at dusk,
scrawny, scraggly little girls;
scratchy porch steps and stinging eyes,
thinking of sex and rain and baby dolls
with a peculiar hunger
while boxes of Cheerios rest
on the screaming, fighting, neighbors’ porch.
Acrid and lonely, little girl,
sad and crazy forever,
formed by the nothingness of life
into a small orange—
flesh and peel, cool and round,
and all promises caught in that
crooked-smiling slice of time—
dark bees of twilight,
broken rope-skipping
splashes of hair, feet bare
and careless,
like a river that dips its feet in you and me
as we flow—slow, slow,
and reach for the sea.
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About a long-lost friend of mine.