Sight Unseen

Beneath the swing set she fed
her little brother a toadstool.
Not to be saved by the reflection in her patent
leather shoes,
not to be caught up by the angels
flapping on a neighbor's clothesline,
not to be recollected through the green lense
of a Kool-Aid pitcher,
carried by a mother long dead,
she denied her innocence then and there.
O child,
O bloody cut healed then picked then healed then picked,
O storms who drive their winds harder in the night,
take her sight unseen,
orphan that she is,
into the witch's cottage.

And so the brother
sits alone on a log
in the park
knowing that something is coming
through the gastropod of his inner ear:
the spring on a screen door
slammed in the last century,
the crunch of a tadpole (still alive)
fed through the claws of a crawfish,
the whine of a child's pet ferret
crushed on a road in a D.C. suburb.

You there in the toll booth,
a fly is on the tube to your oxygen tank.
You there on the seat of that toilet
six miles above the earth,
hurry up, a child is at the door.
You there in the corner of that elevator
where a fight has broken out,
is that a tooth beneath your foot?

You there.
You.
There.