In the pit of this room she sits:
Leningrad babies,
crumbling hair,
an old iron stove
with grease marks
and chicken feathers.
She breathes
out the smells of the city
in which she was born:
poppyseed cakes
cheap liquor,
alabaster.
Years in this new country
but not a note
of English;
a mother and sister
buried half-alive;
old picture frames talk
in the language of soldiers,
in the attic a quiet starvation.
She bought a new blouse,
did her make-up,
then took it all off
with heavy arms,
swollen fingers,
cold toes from too much sugar.
She warns me that
evil is always pretty.
Her heart has four stitches
where the new veins are,
but no one took out
the root of the problem.
She hit her head on the fridge
and cries,
like a child with no mother,
or a mother with no child,
she cannot remember.
Rusty Truck 