Poster-Girls

They found her on the steps of City Hall,
Unsheltered from the February freeze,
Her temperature at twenty-eight degrees.
She must have worn a remnant of her caul,
For, hard on an appeal, the heavens dropped
(While, in a crooning nurse’s tender keep
She snuggled, sucked, and cooed herself to sleep),
A wad of bills and offers to adopt.

Said someone, it would do a deal more good
(God only knows where he was coming from)
To take up a collection for the mom,
Whom no one had adopted yet, or would;
But poster-girls don’t sell themselves for crack,
As someone else shot venomously back.

[The caul is the amniotic sac. A baby born with the remains enveloping its head is considered lucky]

Behind the School

On Monday, after dark, behind the school,
She me t a boy who loved her (so he’d said),
And watched him, as he jimmied out his tool,
And listened, as he bid her give him head;
And, whether love-starvation was to blame,
Her broken home, her mom - controlling, cold -
Or fear of earning, otherwise, a name,
Upon her knees, she did what she was told.

That evening, in the bathroom, tongue outstretched,
Between extremes, she struggled to decide:
Whether to rinse her mouth, before she retched,
Or nevermore to rinse it till she died.
By Tuesday, she’d already been replaced,
And boys were swapping jokes about her taste.

Sandals in the Park

Jogging past, I saw them,
Discoloured by the dark –
A pair of kiddie’s sandals,
Abandoned in the park,

One atop the other,
Like someone stands who’s shy
And twists her braids and blushes,
Afraid to meet your eye.

Hula hoops and Frisbees
(July’s forgotten lees)
I’d come across before, there,
Without the least unease;

These, though, made my heart clench.
Perhaps it was the sight
Of bats, above me, circling
In unfamiliar flight,

Or, perhaps, the cloud scud
Across the autumn sky,
The stars’ malignant glitter,
The moon’s inhuman eye;

Sarah Payne, I thought of –
Abducted by a sleaze –
And wondered if her sandals
Had looked the same as these.

[In July 2000, Seven-year-old Sarah Payne was abducted from a cornfield in England, raped and murdered by Roy Whiting, a convicted sex offender]

Peter Austin lives with his wife and three daughters in Toronto. His poetry has appeared in magazines/anthologies in Canada (including Queen's Quarterly, The Dalhousie Review, The Prairie Journal, Contemporary Verse 2 and Ascent Aspirations) and several other countries. As well as poetry, he writes plays, and his musical adaptation of The Wind in the Willows has enjoyed four productions, the most recent in July '07, in Worcester, Mass.

Email: Peter Austin

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