Police Recover Stash of Stolen Items

A poem written on the occasion of encountering an online news article featuring a close relative.

This poem originally appeared in Newtown Literary 13, Fall/Winter 2018.

Photograph by Lucky Business from Bigstock

The face is the biggest shock
after the name—
your name, almost.

The face you knew from childhood,
mischievous, wry, handsome,
now stony as battered granite,
the young features punched up
and pounded like wet clay
then fired hard in a thousand-degree kiln.

The face discovered with “burglary tools,
methamphetamine and more than 100 stolen items
belonging to more than 30 people.”

The face leaps out from the article
from fifteen hundred miles away,
like a fugitive in a game of
hide-and-go-seek, flushed out
from the shadows of the chicken coop
when you’d forgotten you were even playing,
racing to make it home free.

What could you have done?
Returned more of his phone calls?
At some point you knew, somewhere
in those twenty years of rob arrest repeat,
you had to keep your distance.
He was your cousin. It wasn’t like
he was your brother.

But you weren’t there yet
at that first apartment
where you lived on your own,
when you locked your keys inside,
when that confident, capable face
you'd known from infancy said,
“I'll get in.” And did.

And you thought that was so cool. ∅