Penance

She haunted the attic

staring at a TV screen,

until the national anthem rang an alarm,

belly swollen with teenage angst.

She drank milk from the carton and not much else.

An ex con slept in the downstairs room next

to a crazy sister in law, her screaming

and the slamming doors

announcing it would have been time for dinner,

had there been any.

She listened while crazy read her mother's autopsy,

Ted Bundy the likely culprit,

with signature pantyhose noose.

Another mother in law slept in the closet.

This one's perpetrator was behind bars.

She sucked on cigarettes

with empty eyes and an ironic rumble laugh,

lacking only a few patches of hair

and a soul.

Violence collects in cultivated beds

around family trees.

Morning filled the living room with rabble

from the graveyard shift, appropriately clad

in tattoo ink and ratty clothes,

not a pretense between them.

They called her little momma

and laid themselves on couches, bumming smokes.

The ex con had such kind eyes before he left with

all her things.  One less person to share

the bathroom.

For a while she shared her bed with a girl,

bald and wilting.

She didn't ask her name,

it was a solitary confinement.

When a batch of kittens

turned up

she kept them warm,

nursed each one with the

baby's bottles, but they

one by one

died anyway, sunken eyes

with shut off lights.

She took it as an omen.

What did she know

about saving kittens?