When I Was a Child Welfare Social Worker, They Sent Me to Estrella Street
They threw this street together from brain bleeds and breathless risk,
concussions and long shocks of dark,
from truancy and a blind moon luck
that shines on crossings and prize cockfights, from chicken fat
that bubbles in a pot and from the buckle end
of belts brought down hard on backs of thighs.
Our Lady of Guadalupe, loiters in a doorway
dressed in hard lace lingerie, red as a stop light
as a handprint’s streak across a cheek, street I loved and hated,
in equal parts each time I got sent there
I wished I was somewhere else
or someone else – someone who knew what to do
with a badge and a clipboard on this street that ticked
like a backwards clock, loved and hated, both
holy to me, the further I went the more
I got lost in the cave of smallness that lives
in my heart, that survived
long enough to get here, to remember
everywhere everywhere, opens
from just one street
whose silence is never silence, but the whisper of sticks
rubbed together, as someone – maybe you, maybe me,
schemes to live
inside their skin, seeking any law
of escape – I loved that street the way I love
the desire that climbs my body and cries, the way I love
the engine that turns, the way I love the light that burns
until it’s all the way
spent.
• • •
Treeline
In the winter in Ohio, when the treeline smelled of deer’s blood, I gave a ride to a man and a woman but only because they had children, and the children looked pointy and feral and one of them had a nose that streamed, and a wet cough popped like a bubble over and over in his chest. It was the woman who asked if I could give them a ride. The man showed up half a breath later, from behind a corner. He surprised me. Of course, it was the woman who would ask; they’d had an agreement.
I drove, and the man sat in the backseat – his skull cap pulled down almost over his eyes – not a man all the way. Somewhere between a man and a boy, his anger dull as a nickel, so ancient as to be thoughtless. We were silent, held hostage by the early winter dark. Straight ahead, said the man. The woman looked down at her hands in the front seat. Her hair fell around her face, stringy with damp. I wondered whose daughter and how long she’d been out here. The wet climbed her jeans to her calves. No one said a word. Here, he said, some way out of town. It was a field and nothing else. And far away a treeline. I pulled over. The man, and the children got out first. The woman followed. As they disappeared into the forest, I thought I could see them gallop.
• • •
Sharmila Voorakkara lives in Austin, Texas. Her first book of poems, Fire Wheel, was published by the University of Akron Press.