Your wheelchairs locked when I brought Katie up –
I’d misjudged proximity. She
smiled at the scrape, and you smiled, gently.
(Days when you’d laugh, days when you two would play.
Days when – .)
You are
mermaids on the mend. (It’s just a belief.)
You’ve had three wheelchairs since then,
each less ‘hospital’, each more ‘street’ –
yours and Katie’s meet
in council teenage cool.
I’ll drop the Atlantis romantics, make that the rule.
Katie still toddles, the urban village village fool –
‘Lurch’ to girls who,
with different chromosomal luck,
would have been her bestest friends.
You’ve yet to return to work.
Katie leaves school when the next term ends.