“Entrenched in Poverty in Pembroke,”
The photograph shows a little girl lying across
A bare mattress, eating sauce-less spaghetti
And browned neck bones.
Her hair is beaded like Venus and Serena
When they too graced the front page of the New York Times.
Blocked.
In Pembroke, Illinois, in Kankakee County
There is no bank, no gas station,
No natural gas line, no supermarket,
No police force, no running water, no pharmacy,
No dessert, no salad, no vegetables, no juice, no fruit,
No barbershop, no window panes,
No floor.
Her momma sits on the porch braiding
The other daughters’ hair like Alicia Keys.
Mary J. Blige and Ja Rule are blaring on
The CD stereo. She says to the reporter
With a strained smile, “I want better than this,
Gotta make for them.”
Blocked.
No escape route to a better life:
Joblessness, hopelessness, transportation-less,
No child care.
The governor returns home to Kankakee
With pledges of hope, to break ground
For a hundred million dollar women’s prison
That promises a thousand prison jobs
Or prison beds.
He is certain that his
Effort will help fix the problem.
But another two thousand people live in the woods,
At the end of the dirt roads,
Where the census folks dare not go.
Blocked.
In unyielding poverty,
Sitting on a rickety Big Wheel,
Her son asks, “Ma, can I have another Bone?”
She has no reply as she slides
The final bead on her daughter’s hair.
Phyllis Taylor is a graduate student in English and creative writing at Rutgers-Newark. She expects to complete her book, “The Spinach Dialogues,” in May 2003.
