This is not a poem, but
it’s not a pipe, either.
It's not even the luxurious
cliché of the inarticulate cry –
a list of all the things it’s not.
She is, rather, a child
ditch-drowned and semi-scavenged.
She’d slipped outside unnoticed
from the kitchen’s sweaty womb,
warm with garlic, to find her father –
the one who screams now,
restrained behind a grid
of flesh and yellow tape,
wondering if he will ever again
take another breath.
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