From One Day To The Next

She stepped from the train
with no place behind her to go.
Shadow-boxed eyes
and a vinyl, red suitcase
with crisscrossed strips of gray frugality,
were all she had to hold sanity, and
clothes she’d never worn new.
Her mother would be glad to see her,
it’d been two years,
a broken nose and jawbone,
since the last time she’d laundered wounded tears.
She’d go to church on Sunday,
let her ear drums soak in the preacher’s sermon,
like bruises in a hot bath of scented make-believe,
then confession on Monday.

(all rights reserved Pat Paulk 2005)