Poetry >A HOMELESS SHELTER AND A HALFWAY HOUSE
Denice Laws
A HOMELESS SHELTER AND A HALFWAY HOUSE
Shower times that were as impersonal as any taken in Auschwitz, and for often the same purpose.
Give us this day our daily bland, opaque, cardboard subsistence.
It was scheduled to transport incapable bodies through the incorporeal spaces
and defined the absurdity of a community's ambivalence towards the swept under and ignored.
The common room for the uncommon; bright sunlight glinted off of every disinfected surface.
If Jack was slow he slept on the common floor in a sleeping bag.
If Jack be quick he got a 6 x 8 foot white brick room with metal bunk beds.
It was a prison we called home, Sunday to Thursday;
from three in the afternoon until seven o'clock the next morning.
There were piles of children with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
One day, they put on a puppet show
made out of socks and markers and cardboard.
It was shut down a week after opening due to noise complaints.
Someone was molested, someone got beat up.
A boy got a fishing hook caught through his finger.
Dad cleaned it up while the boy shook and quivered.
Some ladies made a little money on the side.
Mabel did it
by drawing fantastic landscapes full of Unicorns and Dragons.
I watched her for hours and hours and hours,
hoping she'd give one up.
She never did.
We hopped, skipped and jumped our way
out of the locked front doors, across town
to the unemployment office,
that same awful sterility,
full of men like father who couldn't catch
a break
or an unemployment check
after working like a dog
for a company who went belly up
and conveniently bounced the last of the employee checks
before skipping town.
Halfway through that year,
a lucky day brought us to live
in half a house.
A house like any other, but full of half people
and half-truths,
and half-used food that came up missing
in the half shared kitchen cupboards.
We took our broken down, halfway decent car and left that place,
running as far as we could until we were half-dead.