knows if she isn’t celebrating Valentine’s day on the corner with you, late into the evening, red and green lights changing all night long,onetrickafter another gliding by like canoes. You lived for warm cars and cigarettes, large rings and money. No matter what we did, who we called, we couldn’t get you to leave him. You always ran back. I think of you now because it is winter and the snowy world seems so cruel, especially for young girls in short skirts and coats with fur collars. I think of you and of all the truths we never tell our mothers. I wish you safety. Donald sends his love. He’s learning to read while the snow comes down outside my classroom. Stay well. / have a student named Mark whose father died two years ago. He has not said his father’s name since then. He sits with me in a small group, huddled around a table, talking about the lines on a job application. He always leaves the forms Yet someone is singing, and someone is holding out an orange, and someone is reading a poem and someone is carrying light into the kitchen... blank in the second space for parent, his eyes staring away from the paper. Everyone in the group is filling out the form again and again so no one will be afraid when they go to apply for a job. When Mark comes to “ father” he skips the space as usual. But then some gentle girl, some wisp of a teen age girl with the thinnest legs in the world, says to him, “ Mark, you forgot to put in your father’s name.” Without thinking, he writes it in the square. I don’t say anything. He does. He says it out loud over and over, first softly and then loudly: Logan, Logan, Logan. He grabs a piece of paper and writes it and yel Is it and sings it. I hand him chalk and he goes to the chalk board. He covers it with a huge scrawl of Logans, and then a hundred tiny Logans, singing it, playing with it, saying and writing it. Because his back is to me, I don’t see his tears until he turns around, triumphant, his lips moving in rhythm, his hands covered with chalk dust. He sits down. A small girl with heavy bracelets says, “ That’s a nice name, Logan. That your father’s name, huh?” His mother calls me at home that night. She says she has been trying-to get Mark to say his father’s name for two years. She thanks me through her own tears. Weeks later, Mark comes to me after class. He stands in the afternoon light. He asks me, then, how to spell the word, “ deceased”. APRIL It is spring and a woman helps her daughter on to a bus, headed for South Carolina. She is afraid of the gangs. She turns back to the streets. Summer is on its way. Girls scoop up jacks in the schoolyard and dance on tiny legs, pink beads in their hair. A boy picks up a piece of green windshield glass and it flashes in the sun. He walks with it toward his house, while other children in pastel jackets follow. He has never seen anything so beautiful. He is the king, right there, the one who leads the way. He has found something on the street. It is full of gold and his friends are following him. Beyond the abandoned car, windowless and twisted, is this child, walking past the old woman at the bus stop. Dogs move toward him. Beyond the car, settled half on the sidewalk, the fender slanted and ripped in two, is a group of boys and girls, led by the boy, hurrying through the screen door that hangs on one hinge. I have to believe in the importance of this child’s gift, the boys with tears on their cheeks, Langston Hughes, Pedro’s steady gaze before he died. This child smiles as he sets the glass down on the kitchen floor. His mother moves slowly into the room looking for cigarettes. I have to believe she smiles for a moment at the light. • There is nothing that says this is easy. Yet someone is singing, and someone is holding out an orange, and someone is reading a poem and someone is carrying light into the kitchen where cigarette smoke curls against a blue window. There is nothing left but these gifts, what we find despite the sorrow, the loss, the boy who went under the boots, the girl who waits on the corner. There is only this: the fact children find ways to gather the sun. ’ve taken care of people a lot in my life: fourteen year old prostitutes in brassy silk pants. I’ve taken care of crazy kids who bang on my door between classes, and then run in and move their fingers along the gold stars on their chart just to feel their success with their fingertips. I’ve taken care of Sammy, who called the cop on his father because he had beaten his mother so badly that she broke her neck; only she was so high on cocaine she didn’t know her neck was broken. She walked around for days until they put her in the hospital and I had to get Sammy out of class because they said his mother was dying and wanted to say good-bye. I’ve taken care of kids who ran away and hid in basements, the I think of you and of all the truths we never tell our mothers. dampness of the floor living in their backs as they walked old and stiff around the streets looking for money. I’ve taken care of kids who are silent until they explode and no one can stop them, a knife in their hand, the air whipping around their ears. I’ve taken care of Oscar in his pimp clothes: long coats, large hats and boots, who dealt out sweet talk and rolled-up bills, holding his hands out to young women in short skirts. They line up at the door of my rooms and along the walls of my dreams. Julie Landsman writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She was selected for the 1985 Loft Creative -Nonfiction Award and a 1986-87 Loft-McKnight Award in creative prose. 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