“In Mother’s Home, Police Find Body of Little Girl Missing Twenty Years” New York Times, November 27, 1999

This is a fragile baby day. 
The hot stench of decay
Rises up from yellowed paper
And plastic sheets laid bare.

This is a mournful mother day,
When blows I cannot revoke awake
And the heat of the forgotten
Rubs blisters in my skin.

This is the rotting not
Of body but of heart, of sin wrought 
Less in flesh than in my soul.
I have buried my baby whole.

I have nursed her from home to home
These twenty years with hands I loathe,
While love hardened to a ball of jet
And burned a hole in my breast.

She was not dead but sleeping in my womb,
Which is not my body but her home.
I wrapped her tight in plastic coverlets
And laid her in my heart’s deep grave to rest.

But after twenty years gestating
And two decades laid bare I'm waking
From a dream that will not end with crying
But with smoke, and dying.