Forwarding Order Expired

The “thinking of you” card landed back in my lap --
folded, spindled, mutilated, inked all over in red bruises.

The spatters spell it out. I need to forward it to the “home,”
but your home is a brick playpen for cabbage, children and lit candles,

with six-course meals for cousins who keep getting asked, “More?”
with “God forbids” and guffaws cascading down the banister.

It is not a split-level stucco condo bandaged by vertical blinds like jail bars and
white wall-to-wall pile unstained by peeing pets or first-grader finger painting.

It is not a bleached cell with denture-colored walls and call buttons
to replace shouts of “Hey Giddle! Hey Chip! Get a load of this!”

It is not the night desk where your forms are filled and refilled,
the muffled professionals thanking us for our cooperation.

By the time I get this in the mail again, it may boomerang back,
violated all over this last address like a battered woman’s face,

dying the committee death of a dead letter, with no place carrier
pigeons, web servers, or bicycle messengers can forward it to you.

Anne Babson

Anne Babson won the 2003 Columbia Journal Prize. She was the year 2000 winner of the Working People’s Poetry Prize, and she is the recipient of awards from the Atlanta Review and The Grasslands Review, as well as other journals. Her chapbooks include Uppity Poems, Dictation, and Counterterrorist Poems. Another chapbook, Commute Poems, is slated for publication by Gravity Presses. Her publication credits include The Madison Review, Red Rock Review, English Journal,American Poets and Poetry, The Red Rock Review, The Iconoclast, The Wisconsin Review, Controlled Burn, Bridges, Paris-Atlantic, Windless Orchard, The Peking Duck, and Left Curve. She is the curator of the Holy Trinity Poetry Forum reading series in Manhattan and is the Vice President of Literature of Women’s Studio Center in Long Island City.