Sleet starts to fall as she heads down Joy Street,
where children choose cold over crowded homes.
Girls jump rope, rock rag dolls.
Boys shoot marbles, chase dogs.
A woman with a baby on her hip,
her dress loosely tied around her ankles
to keep it from blowing in a delirium of wind,
pulls snapping shirts off a clothesline.
A ball skids across the street.
Checking for horses and wagons,
Edmonia kicks it back. A boy catches the ball,
then throws it to a friend without a nod to her.
She tucks her chin, insists there’s no need
for the ordinary life that can’t be hers.
She climbs a hill past the old burying ground,
where slate stones are carved
with skulls, hourglasses, and angels.
A man touches her arm. Wings press her chest.
A beak nips her throat. She pulls away,
skids through a puddle, meaning to escape
Memory, who creeps through the dark,
but pounces in broad daylight, too.
Her breath turns choppy as a river under a cold wind.
She ducks under brown birds who dart and swoop
for broken bread in the shapes of small fists.
Sleet melts in their small footprints
and on the dark metal of a larger-than-life
figure with a high forehead. The statue
is shown in a coat and vest pulled over
a plump belly and breeches of an earlier era.
She’s seen busts of famous men, but never a statue
of a whole person. Alone on a pedestal, he can’t break.
She runs her palms over the cold
curves of his boot. She must forever be content
with metal and not skin. Tears are stronger
than her effort to hold them back. She can’t
ever again gaze into the eyes of an uncaged deer or a boy.
But perhaps she was wrong to wish
for smallness. Memory can find her anywhere.