New Poetry: Next

I have forgiven myself  

for far worse than the little sin which haunts  

me hardest in stray moments of a day.  

* 

My nine-year-old daughter launches breathless  

through the front door to say  

her friend is walking to the park  

with her family  

and can she go, too? 

* 

No, I say, for obsidian reasons  

I can’t now recall—but all of you  

probably played a part.  

* 

I then read the expectation that I would  

say no   

in her immediate resignation 

and in the minute which follows  

self-loathing floods  

my heart like sea water through the hull  

of a sinking  

destroyer. 

* 

“Yes,” I recant suddenly, “Yes, go.  

Go,” with overperformed beneficence. 

* 

She runs from the house  

yelling, “June,  

wait!” with such desperation  

sad hope 

hungry empty  

grasping at happiness—something more depended  

on her little petition than I have ever been able to grasp—but   

that’s where the memory ends.  

* 

Whether June and her family  

were too far gone  

to be caught, I can’t say. But I hear  

“June,  

wait” in bird song  

in the shing of a knife sharpening  

in the fluttering tissue that separates  

this world from the terrible next.