Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Honorable Mention, selected by the NEPC Board
Foster Kid
Ask her name or where she lives.
She answers: Burke, Fitzpatrick.
Shaughnessey. Old family, new family.
Wake up, we’re home in Rockland, Salem,
Braintree. Her brothers: gone. Or born last
week. Mothers: aunties or ma’ams. Leenie
slurps noodles straight from a pan, stuffs
liverwurst through porch slats, swallows
meatloaf, thin-sliced and too fast. While
the real share dinner in the next room.
She’s four, seven and just turned ten. Never
an only, mostly an extra, always between.
In the next town over it’s October again.
“Foster Kid” first appeared in The American Journal of Poetry
On My Two-Year-Old Brother Gone Missing
Not his ride-on pony,
but its print on the grass.
( )
Galloping white space gathering its fields.
Nicker whisper. Thunder burn.
( )
Once at Angelo’s grocery,
I reached for a small boy.
( )
Niobe at least,
had a corpse for each.
( )
We thought, perhaps Rhode Island.
Or a border town nearby.
( )
But, the stars on his face
haven’t mapped his way back.
( )
Turn off the afternoon.
Then, the sky.
“On My Two-Year-Old Brother Gone Missing” first appeared in Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices.
All of My Younger Selves Live Inside Me
The children do commune with one another.
Most ghost some backwoods
where they would have built a stick house
had they dwelled within their own bodies.
Do not ask them to hold one another. They are shy
as trillium bowing their faces to the earth.
Somewhere within a green echo and ash morning,
seeds of me breed a baggy cloak of dusk,
which extinguishes me the way
the North East wind snuffs match light.
“All of My Younger Selves Live Inside Me” first appeared in the West Texas Literary Review.