Alexa Daskalakis

What We Knew

A child who read the room before the page.

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We knew which lights to leave off and which doors
to open slowly so the hinge wouldn’t speak.
The price of bread was our astronomy.
Every week

had a shape — before the check, and after.
A mother’s voice at dinner, bright and wrong.
Her hands still smelling like the register.
The coat arrived from someone else’s closet, strong

with a stranger’s soap, creased at the elbow
where another child had lived.
The sleeve stopped short of the wrist.
November took what it was given.

The shoes held shut with glue. The laces
stripped from a dead man’s pair.
She sat on the kitchen floor past midnight
with a butter knife, her hair

still pinned from work, prying the sole
back down. The linoleum cold beneath her.
She said nothing.
We learned to say nothing. Neither

word nor want. The walk to school
grew longer when the bus cost more than lunch.
The other children smelled of something
we could not name. A dentist. Vitamins. A hunch

of order — wastebasket emptied before it spilled,
heat in March, a door that locked,
a ceiling where the plaster held.
The teacher’s mouth — the way it stopped

and rearranged before she spoke to us.
The field trip permission slip. The blank line.
I didn’t want to go.
We said it until it grew a rind.

The faucet dripped. The mouse behind the oven
we named but couldn’t feed.
A birthday that was just a Wednesday.
Christmas was a paper plate, some foil, a bead

of glue still wet. The other children
complained of boredom like a splinter.
We’d have kept it in a jar beside the bed
and watched it through the winter.

The phone was not ours. The address
we memorized in case — but the emergency
was daily, was the ordinary
size of things. Our urgency —

a dog whistle.
No one came. We carried it —
a glass of water on a book
crossing a tilted room. Don’t look. Don’t sit.

A child who read the room before the page.
Who turned the body into a quiet place
where nothing spilled. They ask us now,
what was it like? We change our face

the way the teacher did. The telling
is a room they walk through once and leave.
They bring flowers. The petals brown.
The water sits. They grieve

briefly, and with both hands clean.
No one takes the dead flowers out.
No one asks what the kitchen floor has seen

past midnight, in the cold, a woman
on her knees with a butter knife
and a ruined shoe, putting the sole
back on a child’s life.

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Disclaimer: This poem is a work of fiction. The characters depicted are fictional. No character — including the figure referred to as “mother” — is based on, inspired by, or intended to depict any specific real individual, including but not limited to the author’s own parents, family members, guardians, relatives, or acquaintances. No real person is portrayed, referenced, or critiqued in this work, whether living, deceased, or currently in existence. Any resemblance between the characters in this poem and any actual person is entirely coincidental and unintentional. No inference should be drawn from this work regarding any real person’s character, conduct, parenting, caregiving, financial circumstances, family dynamics, personal history, or relationship with the author. This poem is a work of literary and artistic expression. Its characters are imagined. Its themes are universal. This work is not intended to cause harm to any person, nor is it directed at any individual.

Author’s Note: The “mother” in this poem is not the author’s mother. She is a fictional composite — an archetype of borrowed care, inspired by the many unnamed people, often poor themselves, who show up for other people’s children when no one else does: the neighbor, the stranger, the person who had nothing and gave it anyway. The collective voice (“we”) is a literary device representing a fictional composite perspective.