Elisabeth Weiss
Detention Camp
Children skateboard into
the sweetness of what cannot last.
Rachmanes derives from the word for womb.
That little violet face shut in a cage.
Palms grow hard in a border town
where everyone is afraid.
I would say drumroll, please and bring it on
and exuberance is beauty
but hazy-like in the scorching searchlights
one day pushes into another.
Under silver blankets children cry
for their mothers. Rising temperatures hit in waves.
Elisabeth Weiss teaches writing at Salem State University. She’s taught poetry in preschools, prisons, and nursing homes, as well as to the intellectually disabled. She’s published poems in London’s Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, the Birmingham Poetry Review, the Paterson Literary Review and many other journals. Lis won the Talking Writing Hybrid Poetry Prize for 2016. Her chapbook, The Caretaker’s Lament, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016.