Homeless

My son lives on the streets. We don’t see each other much. Like a mother who puts white lilies on the headstone of a dead child, I put money into his bank account, clothes into E-Z Access storage and pretend he’s far away— at a boarding school, or in a foreign country. Nights, I dream fairy tales about him. I dream he becomes a prince, scholar or warrior who rescues me from sorrow, the way he rescued me when he was a child and said, “Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea into the room of his father’s acrimony— brave, standing tall in the forest fire of his father’s scorn. I wake to the empty sound of wind in the trees. He says he wants to live with me. I say I can’t live with him— boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm. Nothing can hold him in, the walls of a house too thin. Back home, I had seen the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them” street bums on Mamo Street, and he’s like them. These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him, I circle the city. One day, I see him on his bike. People give him wide berth, the same way birds avoid power lines, oncoming cars or trees. I park on a side street. Wild-eyed, he flies the block as if in a holding pattern. Not of my body, not of my hopes, he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.