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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

ORE: an excerpt from Ore, the third book of Christophe Casamassima’s Proteus Cycle

In the beginning was the word He bore his threefold soul in his hand His poems: singing theses Even the winds will shy away from their dust. His subjects swell with size streetnoises, loving sleigh We look and we see Requiem No poetry before ours in the insane who clip you and store you Ping, […]

UNTITLED by Han Lei

Return to table of contents for PRACTICES, POWER & THE PUBLIC SPHERE Return to table of contents for Issue 2 Winter 2010

THE MOUNTAINTOP SENDS A POSTCARD FROM THE BREAKS INTERSTATE PARK by Ida Stewart

From here I see three states at once: Virginia underfoot, Kentucky and West Virginia making up the vista, all three joining hands at the Tug.   I wish you were here.   The train is passing. It passes for a long time, wending uphill, around the bend and tunneling. They live for the chug, here, […]

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