Amy Gordon
Faceless
It’s so easy without a face to blend into a crowd.
I stand close to that mother, smelling flowers on her neck.
She should not wear perfume when I am near.
She is bending over, trying to adjust the stroller.
Her baby’s blanket is caught beneath a wheel.
I have no mother. I never was a baby. I have no memory.
Trained early to steal, my long, sticky fingers ooze
into her bag made of old blue-jeans.
Perhaps her grandmother sewed it for her
one April morning. I never had a grandmother.
I carry a satchel made of skin. What I want,
when I steal, is a mouth. If I could speak,
I would scream, but I have no tongue,
only unloved fingers. All I can do, every day,
is tap evil into the world. I want my words
to give me a face. I want a face,
and I want it emblazoned on every cloud,
so when it rains, my features drizzle into cups of coffee.
What I retrieve from the woman’s mockingbird’s nest
is a nail. What does she think she is going to build?
A shelf for plates? A book case for books?
I will pierce ordinary pleasures with her nail,
and replace them with nothing so I can have a face.
Amy Gordon is the author of numerous books for young readers, including When JFK Was My Father (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) and Painting the Rainbow (Holiday House, 2014), both works of historical fiction haunted by helpful ghosts. Her poems have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Aurorean, Plum, Blue Nib, and in the anthology Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books, 2018).
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