Day 445

She learns her cousins are still alive
but their parents are dead.  She’s eight.
Her cousins are twins, four years old.
She asks her mother what they might need,
since they’ve lost everything:  clothes, toys.
I can give them my clothes, she says; but
since their house was destroyed, all she has
is a couple of t-shirts, one pair of cotton pants
that, in the last months, have grown too short.
She lies on the floor of her tent, wondering
what she can give them to
console them.  She would give them
her toys, but she has none.  She’s made a doll
from a torn piece of a towel:  tied it with string
at the top to give it a head, drawn eyes
and a mouth with a used expo marker
she’d found in the dust.  It’s her only toy
but she’ll share it with them. The thought
calms her a little.  What they want 
most of all, she knows, is their parents
Their parents have gone to wherever it is
you go after death; they’ve joined
her own father there.  She imagines them
sitting around a table, talking and laughing,
smoking, drinking coffee, the way it was
before everything happened.  I can share
my mother with them, she thinks, and she imagines
the twins sitting on her mother’s lap
as though there were a chair, as though 
there were a warm room to sit in.