RWB Workshop Poem of the Week – June 24, 2015

Zorida Mohammed

The Lost Parents

He rented her out
in the summer,
when no one would notice.

Always to a man,
a man with a car,
one of her father’s friends.

She’d been warned to heed the renter’s bidding.

They lived in the car,
and sometimes in a motel.

She was 13.

Her mother had disappeared early on.
Her siblings were “vipers.”

She searched and found her mother
in a mental hospital.
Or was it a an old folks home?

She forgave her everything.
The visit made her almost high

But the silence that followed
when her mother melted back into her world
plunged her into a wilderness.

Even her forgiveness
was not trick enough.