Alabama Baptist Church closes day-care center,
says mothers who work damage children
CNN News, April 3, 1997

i.

On the edge of town, locked out of home,
Ginger shivers
onto the books, protection against the frozen earth,
and pulls her coat over chapped knees,
making herself small as possible
against winter wind blowing snow and sand
horizontal into her body.

ii.

Rachel’s eyes are rimmed crimson again,
she cries out in the night with familiar pain
in a house where a working mother has learned
to summon sleep with glasses of warm water
and loving bedtime stories to fill the soul
if not the belly.

iii

Robert stands silent at the roadside—
unlovable, violent.
For six years,
before he knew what it meant,
a hindrance, the appendage no one wanted;
now, at seven, he becomes the spoils,
the pawn, of value only after all other assets
have been divided.