Just as the bus pulls up
not in the bus stop spot
where a car is parked,
the policeman
I saw open his door, cover
his head with his fluorescent
rain coat, turned away as if
someone had just called his name
that bus pulled up
farther away from us
rain, harder than before
we run as one, my daughter
in her pink flip flops,
my sandals left unstrapped.
“Mom,” she calls, “Why can’t we
be a family again?”
The locket with her father’s picture
spinning on her neck
like a cartwheel, and I think of
the first, one hand
then the other, legs, then my body
taking me over.
To have the whole world
No strings, nothing holding me down.