After midnight, I dragged carpet padding
from a trash bin and spread it on the asphalt
between the wall and dumpster. Screened from sleet,
I pulled carpet remnants over me, and that night
I married, raised a family, and outlived everyone
except a daughter- a teacher- and her two children,
one damaged. I woke when a bread truck scraped the bin.
From under damp carpet, I watched punctilious men
sign invoices, sweep, hose down the docks. A boy
in a bloody butcher’s smock leaned against the wall
and smoked through bloody fingers.
At night, I search
and sometimes find my daughter. “I make good money now,”
I tell her. “Let me take Teresa home with me.
I can buy the help she needs.” My daughter smiles,
asks how I’m doing, and I lose the moment
to my wife, my job, my actual
family, as the thick-faced infant bucks in her arms
or beats her forehead hard and almost musically
against the table. When I clench her to my belly,
she screams, red faced and rigid. “Hush, hush, hush,”
I serenade her. “O unhushable baby, hush.”
My Daughter
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