When I gave her up to the attendant
at the airline she might have been
as small as she was inside me-
her lungs improperly formed, the spaces
between her fingers webbed, her skin
translucent and her beating heart visible.
Special needs, I wanted to shout,
and travel holding her like a wheelchair,
or her hands upon me like crutches.
But she was thirteen, journeying to Florida
to visit her aunt and grandmother. It was hurricane
season. I imagined her listening to conchs,
spreading her body hot as hibiscus
on the beaches. Yet when she called
it was to speak of Adam, her almost-cousin
my sister's foster son, all the things
gone wrong in his four years:
the father who'd snapped his baby sister
like red coral; the father who'd sodomized
him. That afternoon he'd swum with dolphins,
my daughter said, and when he climbed from
the ocean he took Sarah's fingers, delicate as shells,
thin as strands of seaweed, and urged her to slip them
inside him. My daughter's heart was weeping.
When my sister came on, she apologized, telling me
she was in over her head, that she'd held
her boy in the dolphin pen not knowing
if she could love him. Not even love, she said.
Something so simple, and fierce enough
to ground my flying child forever.
