Remainder


It’s been twenty-one days.
Sarah could have sworn she saw
Bianca’s face, blurred in the smoky
glass of a crawling, brown sedan.
A stunned classmate looked twice
at a girl in the mall—it wasn’t Bianca,
hand held by a mothering stranger.
For a moment, she was just behind
the shelf of library books,
a voice from the other side,
papers handed in without
a name, laughing shoes hiding
beneath the slide at recess.
She was a glimpse of some other
child rattling a bike over cracked
asphalt, circling the vacant lot where
Bianca’s ten-speed was found.
After three weeks, the delusion
of permanence makes seventh graders
glance up to see their classroom’s phantom
limb, a desk removed, since Bianca
was taken to the corner of their eye.


Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review
Fall / Winter, 2007