For Jennifer Stroud Wirth
My sister became our mother
at twelve, screeching
lessons onto the blackboard,
lecturing letters and numbers, and
prodding her fraying pull down map
with a stick. She taught of better places than this
must filled basement classroom
with walls like a dungeon—
peers' spiders and beetles. Upstairs
her predecessor creaks
furies into the floorboards,
each agony a puff of dust
drifting down from the rafters. Mad
Enyo, groping blindly for her lost eye;
husbandless—she can no longer prophesy.
