We took a chainsaw to the tree she liked to climb,
let it rest a few days then dug out the stump,
the patient roots. In its place a trembling rose
whose petals dropped in the heat wave. Keep nothing.
Inside I scrubbed the five panels of each door
and then I filled her bed with another child.
You say the girl who left is a butterfly
so I want you to hear how the insect’s body
makes a bowl to hold the soup it will become.
A decision comes, dissolving,
and then another decision, a reassembly.
Emergent, they call it, the span of days
just after a child is removed from her mother.
I was her third foster mother, she was with us nearly three years.
Removal once meant to stir up, as in leaves
at the bottom of a lake, caused by moving back or away.
Back, away, the child here, there, the child
neither here nor there. When the heat wave came
some of us who survived swore we’d visited a new place,
a new life. On the hottest day my son found a pair of glasses
at the bottom of the lake and they were mine. My phone lights up
as the girl’s family sends photos: training wheels off,
tying her shoes, a lost tooth. Keep nothing. I heart,
keep my mouth shut. We kept her in cashews and sidewalk chalk,
kept her mother’s photo on our wall, we kept the child for far too long
but we weren’t trying to keep her, no, not keep
as in a castle’s windowless room, as in to steal,
to want to steal, to even think of stealing.
Last week, when people died on the sidewalks
and millions of shellfish were cooked alive on the coast,
we booked the hotel’s last room, an air-conditioned ark.
How did her mother survive that day
or this one, her daughter gone, my part
redacted, though we both know it: I mothered her child
as my own. It’s just grief, the social worker says, exasperated.
Three months now since the girl left. On my knees
I can still sometimes find a sock, a wrapper.
In today’s mail a catalog with an orange dress,
the kind of orange she was always going back and forth about.