The Kidnapping

Grandmother left her youngest child, Alice, with a neighbor

          on the top floor because she was moving

into another building where she could be the Super. She didn't

want the baby in the middle of all that mess. Her husband, Blackie,

driving up and down Tenth Avenue,

delivering electrical supplies—plugs, cords, little relay boxes like

          the black recorders plucked years later

from drowned airliners, a voice behind Blackie already saying,

"We're going down, we're going down!" The neighbor disappeared

with Alice. No note, no nothing. Just

the empty apartment. Blackie had a few more drinks near the docks

          on Twelfth Avenue, near the German

freighters, talking about the Lindbergh baby. Burly men grew misty

eyed and cursed Bruno Hauptmann. The newsreel ran on and on.

After mother grew up and married the ex-

bootleg driver with the melancholy face, maybe she thought her

          sister could be recovered

if she named her own daughter Alice. The baby growing into a

pigtailed girl inside my sister, who woke nights afraid she couldn't

breathe, who sleepwalked

toward the kitchen window with the loose pane that popped out

          the next morning and floated down

into the alley like a transparent soul the neighbors looked through

before it crashed near the Super sweeping up clothespins and bottle caps.

Whose hand was it in art class drew

the little house with the smoking chimney and three children

          instead of two, arms and legs spread

out, spinning in the air? Who first bled through bargain cotton

panties? My sister clawing at her face, something pinching her

abdomen, twisting up an eye.