Duplex Foster Child (response)

Erin Russell


Like uniform growths on the underbelly of a curling/yielding shoot
Spreading white hives, the thighs of late pregnancy,
When they left you at the duplex you were old enough
Already the night was
Sleepless the sound of jets
The wrist-slit sky you stone faced the spackled ceiling
The smell of her boyfriend’s cigarettes, the molding/rolling papers like
Currency in absent reference
Like stars that extinguish in cities
His cowboy
     Boots in the corner near the open door
The negative space of ankles knocking out like tumours
           
      Coldplaying /in/ the split level den       straight on till morning
                        Other children, foster children, Overwatch-gamer lost children below your crepe paper mattress
folding words away,
               folding worlds away,
bookending palimpsests on your as-yet unmarked skin

Nameless boys, curious boys, first-star-on-the-right boys                  
   the boots

           were brown or bottle green



Erin Russell is a writer from Calgary living in Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in Scrivener, Montage, Time Out Amsterdam, and The Holland Times among others, and has been translated into French and Chinese. She won the Wycliffe College Poetry Award at the University of Toronto two years in a row. She lectures in literature and writing at Amsterdam University College.