Didi Menendez' innovative on-line journal entitled POETS & ARTISTS includes a poem of mine in its June 2010 edition, entitled The Secret Life of Others.
View POETS & ARTISTS on-line at : www.poetsandartists.com
The Secret Lives of Others
Your daughter calls from a Utah jail outside Flaming Gorge, so of course you go. Fly to the nearest airport, drive three hours in the remote dark till finally you arrive at a hotel made of long trailers with four small rooms each. You think, maybe, you are in a psycho-movie. But your daughter is a meth-addict, incarcerated for credit-card fraud, roaming the country with a friend named Bullet.
It is almost midnight. You consider the dirty trailers, ask to sleep instead in the jail because it’s safer, but end up back in one of the dank, musty rooms. You call the next morning, but your daughter is no longer at the Flaming Gorge jail. The sheriff says she’s been moved to Oklahoma to a federal penitentiary. You don’t know what to do. No really, you don’t know what to do. So you wait. Sip coffee in a Styrofoam cup, count the cigarette burns in the carpet. After awhile, the sheriff says go home, you should just go.
Back at home, the phone rings. Your daughter is on the other line saying she is safe now. Bullet is gone. She didn’t know she was being moved, but now it’s all okay. Your heart is in your heels, calloused, tough. But your eyes are leaking and your daughter hears the water in your voice and says not to worry, she’ll be moved to California next summer so you can visit. You hang up the phone. You know this is a story that doesn’t end. You circle the date on next year’s calendar in red, glaring at you like a bull’s eye, like a scab that won’t heal.