Ordinary Psalm With Severe Neglect

I was working day shift at the County Shelter,

102 degrees in the tattered shade of that street

and this kid, maybe 5 or 6, had been scrubbed clean,

her hair oiled for lice. Her teeth rotted brown

 

from sucking juice bottles to sleep, she was busy

climbing over the dirty couch in the day room,

though when I offered, she sat next to me,

slipped her small weight against mine. The TV

 

was tuned to Animal Planet, that episode

where Arctic caribou shudder the tundra,

travelling hundreds of miles over snow, each footstep

placed exactly in the one before, the one behind,

 

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Julia B. Levine

Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her latest collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight, (LSU press 2014) as well as the 2003 Tampa Review Prize for her collection, Ask; the 1998 Anhinga Poetry Prize and bronze medal from Foreword magazine for her first collection, Practicing for Heaven, as well as a Neruda Award from Nimrod, and a Discovery/The Nation award. Widely published, her work has been anthologized in America We Call Your Name, The Places That Inhabit Us, The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry . She received a PhD in clinical psychology from UC Berkeley, and lives and works in Davis, California.