VISITING DAY

[Published in the Loch Raven Review, Fall 2012]

VISITING DAY

Outside the fence,
women and children stand
below the tower,
the bored guard watching
the Saturday morning routine.
Mothers, wives, girlfriends
stand silent and stoic,
arms crossed, waiting.
Children talk and play
with their Saturday morning friends,
filling the time until the gate opens,
waiting, as they wait each Saturday
for their time to visit
sons, husbands, boyfriends, fathers,
to sit at a visitor’s room table,
hold hands, hug, talk,
just like the rest of us
at the end of each day,
after work and school,
around the dinner table.

Outside the fence
women wait and children play,
all doing their time
as they do each Saturday
under the gaze of the guard,
waiting for the gate to open,
this scene a repeat of last weekend's
and the weekend before that...

At the end of the line
a young girl sits,
back to the fence,
head in hands,
watching traffic pass.

PATUXENT RIVER STORY

[Published in Symmetry Pebbles, issue #4]

PATUXENT RIVER STORY


They flow, county to county,
pushed by tides of indignation,
slowed by pools of indifference,
unseen, unnoticed, unknown by most
(who would be appalled if they knew),
but they are there,
at the bars near the track,
on the corners near the cheap motels,
in the parking lot behind the diner.

They flow, county to county,
in a jurisdictional eddy,
Anne Arundel, Howard, Prince George’s,
pushed by the police from one to the other,
one to the other,
one to the other
in a slow, continual cycle.

Do we care to know who they are?
Or, what they want?
They flow in a different channel,
dead ended,
caught like so much debris behind a strainer,
eddied, swirling, stopped,
watching as the Patuxent flows freely to the Bay.

THE TIRE SWING

[Published in the Loch Raven Review, Fall 2012]


THE TIRE SWING


The tire swing hangs straight,
rope unbent by play,
time unmarked
by a daydreamer’s lazy pendulum;
grass grown into the bare patch
where feet once scraped
and pushed off for speed.

The children are gone,
to other trailer parks,
acres of double-wides in the sun
clean, suburbanized, orderly,
and out of the way;
to cramped apartments
stacked atop one another;
or to motels along Route 1
where they play among the tires
of parked cars and diesel trucks,
feet scraping across an asphalt lot.

Among the trees and the weeds,
all that remains:
an old washer,
toys that fell from a box—
forgotten and unnoticed—
empty concrete pads
where trailers stood,
cinder blocks holding up only air.

When the tree is cut down
to make way for a four bedroom home
and a manicured lawn
with its ornamental tree,
the tire will swing again,
for just a moment,
before plunging to ground.