Them

She stands in the parking lot of the cheap motel, casually smoking a cigarette on her break.  The planes on her face and the slump of her shoulders tell their own wordless stories.

He sits in a chair in his apartment, perfectly angled towards the television, and tries to focus on the conversation at hand.  His adolescent son looks towards him with unyielding loyalty and a misguided sense that this time, things will be different.

She grieves. 

He telephones and talks for thirty minutes.  The loneliness crackles through the line like its own living, breathing thing.  Reassurances are lost.

Hauntings

The air bag was stained with blood.  Its starkness was startling on the white canvas.  The wood chips from the utility pole were still wedged between the shattered windshield and the frame.  I blinked uncomprehendingly at the wreckage.  The sister was standing nearby in a back brace.  Her movements  jerky.  Her posture rigid.  The brother remains in the Critical Care Unit.  The right side of his face torn away from bone.  His jaw wired shut.  The mother grabbed my waist and cried.

Untitled

Shane Koyczan's "making noise", resonates in the most cluttered and disorganized parts of myself. I am not swooping to extraordinary heights nor sinking to extraordinary lows.  Life inexplicably wakes me in the morning and leaves me tossed and tangled in the bedsheets at night.  I have the universe in my veins.  It pumps my heart and expands my lungs.  Yet I feel so all together ordinary.  Bound by routine and responsibility.  What do I want to MAKE NOISE about?  What do you?


"make noise for the son or daughter that lives inside you. maybe someday we’ll understand what our parents went through.

make noise for everything you think you thought you knew as if knowing was enough to tough off the hard times; noise for the mimes that won’t, for the people that don’t, for the children that can’t. make noise because the land of oz is crumbling and the tin man needs a heart transplant.

this is for each senseless rant that will one day make sense."
-Shane Koyczan

Whence I Came

Foster children carry things.  I didn't notice at first.  The hesitant fourteen year old girl with blond streaks?  She carries bags.  Tote bags.  A purse.  A backpack.  She also carries an Olan Mills style portrait from several years ago.  It's tucked protectively in the front cover of her school binder.  The smiles of her family mask the erosion caused by intravenous drug use.  Mr. Mills did not capture everything that day.  The seventeen year old girl who so strongly resembles her mother?  She carries her obituary.  A reminder of the interconnectedness of mother and daughter.  Addict and child.  If one could assign absolutes, it would be easier. Good people.  Bad people.  How uncomplicated.  How deceiving.  The love for a biological family is unyielding, uncompromising and takes precedence over social workers, law enforcement and juvenile courts.  It burns inside these children of loss.  A love that calls out to them continuously. A sound to which they abide. 
Foster children carry things.

"Wild Geese"

"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert,
repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves"

Mary Oliver