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SAFE RETURN by Carrie Shipers

July 1, 2011 Contributed By: Carrie Shipers

On the news, we thanked the FBI,
local and state police, volunteers, everyone
who helped us bring our daughter home.
We asked for privacy while she recovered

but were sure she wouldn’t need counseling,
just a nightlight, new clothes, patience
when she acted out.  She came home
with bloody socks and no underwear.

She has lice and open sores, wrecks the toys
we bought every birthday, Christmas
she was gone.  At night we lock her door
so she won’t hurt the baby, look for the gun

she thinks we have.  If we say no she bites,
goes for our eyes with pencils and plastic
knives.  Every day we pray, try to remember
she’s just a child, a little girl who survived

a terrible ordeal.  She’s a brat, an animal,
an eight-year-old demon we don’t deserve.
Our nightmare isn’t over.  What they found
isn’t yet—might never be—our daughter.

 

Return to table of contents for Issue 4 Summer 2011

Filed Under: Poetry Posted On: July 1, 2011

Further Reading

REQUIEM by Cindy M. Carter

The first bullet makes a brand new hole in a history vermilion. Potholes, bullet holes, dark stains upon the paving stones. Months from now, all this will be replaced. Heads, arms, legs, trunks, tanks, guns, bitumen and bicycles. One long row of cycles crashes to the ground. It will be some time before the corpses […]

Changing
by Erinn Seifert

You lie awake, tired and lonesome underneath a horrifyingly new patchwork blanket of your dead grandfather’s old clothing. The boy dropped you off thirty minutes ago, and you walked the half mile up your secluded driveway in the middle of the last dark hour before dawn broke. The pine trees buzzed with morning birds and […]

GUAYAQUIL by Eric Arnold

When we were South Americans We were riding the statue of a horse Elizabeth was Simon Bolivar I was Jose de San Martin And I was listening to Def Leppard on my Walkman The financial district was absorbing all of this Into its dark When we drove to Minnesota Patches of winter rye On the […]

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