Rooted

What little boy comes to stay
at his new foster home
with a boxful of trucks and toys,
and has absolutely no idea how to
imagine what they
might be doing?

I sat in the dirt with him,
letting ants crawl
across sticks and
onto our pants legs.
The trucks climbed rocks
and anthills.

I proposed fantasy worlds
featuring his stuffed dog, Fluffy,
and threw it a birthday party
complete with a cake.

I sniffed the top of my new son’s head
as he eventually
played out crash-up derbies
featuring drivers with,
inexplicably,
Irish accents
at my feet
while I wrote.

Son, the seed of your addiction
had been invisibly planted
before you came,
And had I known it,
known how,
I would have
yanked it out and
burned it on the
trash pile
day one.

My boy, my boy,
how I wanted to
give you back
with confetti
with a parade
every single moment
that had been stolen from you.

I still do.

By: Drema Drudge

Drema Drudge is a novelist and poet whose work blends emotional candor, intellectual inquiry, and the everyday with longing. She earned her MFA from the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Her work has appeared in The Louisville Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and is forthcoming in Suspended Magazine and others.