By Kerri French
I mail a letter to Madonna
asking her to adopt me.
Ten years old, there is no
other woman I imagine
I could love more—
even the teenagers
in the neighborhood agree,
Like a Prayer falling
from the open windows
of cars parked outside
the pool of the apartment complex—
my bedroom window
left open, too, just wide enough
to slip out to the roof
of the utility shed below
the way an older kid
showed me when we first moved in.
From the sloped roof
of the shed, the whole complex
becomes a map
of my existence, the pool
trailing off to the basketball
courts whose hoops
have long been removed,
and beyond the playground,
the creek and tunnels
I explore on hot afternoons
when I pack my bags
with every book I own and sit
on the rocks until dinner.
Still a kid, I already imagine
I live somewhere
I don’t belong, how Madonna
must have felt before leaving
Michigan, no friends to write to
once she was gone.
Here, my only friend laughs
after shoving me down
in the tall grass, my stack of books
breaking my fall
and spreading before me
like rumors at the bus stop.
In my letter, I send Madonna
a list of my favorite foods,
promise her she won’t even know
I’m there, the same way
two girls parked below never
see me on the roof, their lips
meeting before their eyes
fully close.
Kerri French is the author of Every Room in the Body (Moon City Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award. Her poetry has appeared in Washington Square Review, BOAAT, Copper Nickel, The Journal, Mid-American Review, Barrow Street, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nashville Review, DIAGRAM, PANK, Best New Poets, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, among others. A North Carolina native, she has lived in Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and England and holds degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC-Greensboro, and Boston University. She lives and writes outside of Nashville, TN.