10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She’s Fine

Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book

itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl

and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder

spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall

above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train

engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.

Who shot you, baby?

I don’t know. I was playing.

You didn’t see anyone?

I was playing with my friend Sharon.

I was on the swing

and she was—

Are you sure you didn’t—

No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard

people yelling though, and—

Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked

you a little sideways, made you need air differently.

You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.

I ain’t seen nobody, I told you.

And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,

or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams

Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,

we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:

an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating

with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor

underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling

toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t

all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,

no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers

through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce

the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.

Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who

will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering

Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls

shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from

his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums

a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.

Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through

Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.