The hall is crowded. Is the world shrinking?
The tight, still necks show judgments as sharp
as those of the man in the robe, his pale hand by a gavel.
The lawyer stands straight as a post, raises a thick book.
The doctor never examined the contents of the patients’ bowels
or stomachs. This medical text confirms that’s the only way
to prove poisoning. Can the state of Ohio in good faith
convict someone of attempted murder with no proof?
Each word is a spider, catching Edmonia’s breath
in its web. Edmonia looks at her lap. Once she was a child,
winding loops of string between two pairs of hands,
tugged in four directions. She spun swans opening wings,
rivers colliding, and people turning to animals.
Was that a stone or a door, land or sky?
Guessing was part of the game.
Candles, diamonds, cat’s eyes, fish, stars, ladders,
and fences swallowed one another,
until the pictures shredded like clouds in the wind.
At last the judge meets the lawyer’s gaze.
He dismisses the case for insufficient evidence.
Edmonia ducks under cheers, cries, gasps, shouts
of No! as if at the end of a game or fumbled magic act
that continues to distort what’s seen or unseen,
a girl stumbling into a hole.
Father Keep shakes Mr. Langston’s hand, turns
to Edmonia, warns, You must stay
on your best behavior. Nothing can go amiss.
People shove forward to shake her hand,
pat her head or shoulders. Every touch feels dangerous.
Beyond the shouts, silence stings like spoken judgments.
Edmonia reaches for her crutches, which clatter as they fall.
Boys bend to pick them up. Girls squeeze her arms.
I’m all right, she says, her words swept off
by the river of hands around her,
the cheers as if there were no difference between
lack of proof and innocence, which she still means to claim.
This isn’t a victory, or even the end of a story.
Her chance to speak is gone.