Trauma- but she hides the “u” in a thicket of accent so now it sounds like she’s discussing the impact of an Italian train- the sharp crawl of which carried her here today- to this modern courthouse, white icing of polished marble stretching the length of the lobby in hopes you might call it a “dance floor”. But I say “basket”, in remembrance of the times the losses were too much for the losers to bear and they tossed themselves from the balconies above.
“I need you to come to my house tomorrow. I don’t want my father finding my body,” she hisses in my ear- whispers that yelp and tuck their haunches as they flee a master’s kick. But they don’t pay me enough for that- so she just runs laps above the abyss instead.
‘Can you actually get addicted to ketamine?’ I’m wondering. Maybe he’s an outlier. Sleeping in a tent where the high grass grows on the park’s boundary lines- skate shoes kickflip torn in the spot by the little toe from the repeated action of the flick, which spins the board beneath a rising body- “Foster care” is a secular term, “group home” too- and now here he is trying to keep his own family-less business of rootless movement over deaf pathology- jellyfish adrift- from this baby.
“Trama”.
Can you really pierce the space between your eyes?
your septum?
lips?
and your throat- then anchor chains to those places and fasten them to the collars of your pit bulls so that when they run, violently forward it will tear your face off or is this just something you say to strangers in common spaces? Something you say to me because I have a place for it?
I walk the river-glass sidewalks of Southie public housing. Old Colony Projects before they tore it down- where even the grass is exhausted by the sound of people shouting. Past the place where a man attacked her with a box cutter for lack of reason-
Where she buried a daughter and colored in coloring books on the days she missed her most- Lost two more to the system and I stood in the same courthouse arguing “she’ll never be middle class.” It was our best defense.
Five years later they were returned- by that time she’d colored the bodies of the train cars like a graffiti writer
then drowned accidentally in the bathtub.