Читать книгу Dead Girl Dancing - Mike L. Nichols - Страница 13

Numbers Game - 1984

Teen drug rehab begins with ten

days PJed detox on a locked wing.

Stare through the steel Safe-T screen

at the playground swings across the street.

Stand in line with the other jonesing patients

for your cigarette ration. In group sessions

say nothing unless pressed.

On Family Day circle up

in the one-on-one room.

Talk about the damage

you’ve done. Then,

Mom is saying

The cancer came back.

Like a relative you never liked, knocking

while opening the door calling,

Hello? Hello?

And it’s spread like,

like cancer. Everywhere.

Maybe three more months.

Definitely not a year.

Dead mom walking.

In group you can talk about

fourteen-year-old girls selling

sex for a quarter gram,

or drug deals gone bad with

keg-boots to the back of heads,

teeth congealing in gutter red,

but you cannot picture her

faded husk filling a casket.

On Family Day you sat side by side

holding hands and cried.

See her tendons laced with

bulbous blue-green veins.

A connection, for a moment

greater than the unknown

sum of her remaining days.