Published Spring 2006
 
The Social Worker
I invite her to make an appointment;
I think I can help.
You won't catch me in an office, she promises.
So we settle on coffee,
the reliable prop: even at its murkiest
with grinds rimming the cup,
it means enough to call up civility and unfurl a transient
bridge across unlikes.
Considering she has had so much
taken away,
I let her choose the place.
We huddle in a cramped diner,
Plexiglas closing in,
cloudy exhales mingling with sputtering
fry grease.
At a one-legged table with a tiny square top,
she puts her hands on the surface
and spreads her fingers wide, palms flat, ready to trace
into Thanksgiving turkeys.
She pulls her sleeves up near her elbows, an unself-
conscious, crisp gesture, and catches me looking
then gasping
(inwardly only—I summon my good manners, those inherent
as well as those trained into me)
at the labyrinthine welts,
the topographic graffiti,
so many mouthless worms pressed onto her skin,
frozen en route.
Catching my eye before it pulls away,
she crumples and tosses my gaze with one
easy Pall Mall laugh.
With the fingers of her left hand still splayed
like the legs of a gymnast after the split,
she uses her right to stab
at the blank space between with a table knife
that probably last sliced a tomato, mealy and seeded
green.
She laughs with each miss, each time the silver point
marks the Formica instead of her own pulp.
I remind myself that I am here to help.
I unfold the list. I spin the paper to match her perspective, so that I
read it upside-down.
~ Prove abstinence from illicit
substances
~ Find safe housing
~ Earn gainful employment
~ Submit to psychiatric assessment
~ No further involvement with
the criminal justice system
~ Supervised visitations until further notice
And then,
as if it were another person at the table,
as if she needed to impress that chipped cup,
she turns to her coffee
and tears off the tops
of two packets of sugar—a single straight
rip with a finesse that comes from somewhere
other than her weeping
arms.
After she watches the spill of white
After she stirs clockwise seventeen times
After she blows on the roughened liquid's surface
After she takes the smallest of sips
she finally returns.
Her eyes narrow;
as she peers at me
through the scrim between us
she says
You've made a mistake.
Her words are even and frightening and carved without
mercy.
Her voice finds muscle.
It's not so very much to do to get your kids back, after all, I
reason.
She cradles her cup and smiles into her coffee
as if at an old sly friend.
When she answers, she speaks
more to the dishwasher-weary, stained-silent
eggshell-blank
—warm with bodies touched and lost—
crockery
than to me:
But what if—
she raises the mug
I—
she sips large
don't—
she swallows with certainty
want them?
I watch the table dip
under the weight of the impossible
and the headstone-heavy list of archetypal assumption
as her words cut icy rivulets
into the cosmic lie.
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