Miss Us

They Don’t Miss Us They found the old school bus Shoved the engine out the back Made a garden in the aisle Nobody told them how They sleep behind the library Where the ceiling doesn’t leak They wear the laminated hall passes Like teeth around their necks They know which vending machines Still have something behind the glass They know which grown men cry When you ask them what comes next They pulled the school maps down To patch the holes against the sleet Used the aluminum flagpole To hold the bean vines upright One girl keeps a coil of copper wire Wrapped around her wrist One boy knows which expired pills Still look right We keep calling them children They keep watching our hands They know who reaches first They know who cannot stand They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They learned the dark Without a name for night They don’t need our stories To tell them what survived They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They don’t want the keys To the rooms we burned They don’t miss us They’re just waiting For our names to blur They made a god from old car batteries And a doll head full of rain Wrote a list of new numbers Across the rusted flank of a train They trade in little silences And things they dug out of walls They know which adults are dangerous By how softly they talk One girl keeps a box-cutter Taped inside her sleeve One boy feeds the pigeons From a sack marked emergency They found our quarterly reports And folded them into boats Floated them down the drainage ditch To see which ones would sink We keep saying they need us They keep moving the storage They don’t ask what we lost They ask for the voltage They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They learned the dark Without a name for night They don’t need our stories To tell them what survived They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They don’t want the keys To the rooms we burned They don’t miss us They’re just waiting For our names to blur I heard one ask What a mortgage was Another said It sounds like a cage One found a wedding photo And asked why everyone was standing still One found a copper badge And used it to scrape the grease From under her nails One found my name On a glass office door And asked me What I was for I opened my mouth Nothing came out They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They learned the dark Without a name for night They don’t need our stories To tell them what survived They don’t miss us They don’t miss us They don’t want the keys To the rooms we burned They don’t miss us They’re just waiting For our names to blur They are not waiting For the world to return They already know What our names are worth