Skylark (8 page)

Twig introduces me as the “newest, youngest slam champ on the block.”

“Go, Angie!” people shout. Even Mercy Girl. I wait until the audience quiets, and then I introduce my poem.

“Things got hard for my family this last year.” I say. “Mom lost a bunch of jobs, Dad couldn't find work, and finally we got kicked out of our apartment. My mom, brother and I have been living in a car for the past few months. Some people think this is something to be ashamed of. Anyway, everything's okay now. We just got a home. Subsidized housing. A palace.”

People clap and cheer. Some look toward Clem, who looks freaked out. But he manages to give me a thumbs-up.

“What happened, basically, is my family wobbled. That's what we did. But everything wobbles, the Earth in its orbit and a skylark on the wind. How else do you get back to the truth?”

I wait a second, then start singhollering my latest performance piece.

The street is a vein, a seam, a stain

between you and me, the street

is an asphalt river. I took a long

     
swim there.

With my mother and my brother.

We would not let each other drown.

No. We let each other swim there.

No coins in our pockets to weigh us

     
down

and our lungs and hearts filled with

hope. And when hope failed, with faith

that the street would do what it was

     
meant to do,

deliver us whole and untroubled,

     
somewhere new.

Let me start at the beginning.

     
We were living

in the Buick Skylark and Mom still

     
managed to look

like a million bucks every day…

I don't care whether people clap when I am through. I don't care if I win the finals or not. All I care about is that I've found home.

Acknowledgments

Thank you, John, Anne, Catherine, Meg, and Donald, my siblings and father, with whom I thrived in many houses—you have always been tremendously encouraging. I am very thankful, too, to the poets I met during the years I was between houses, especially the late poets Karl Wendt and Patrick O'Connell. Thank you, Alden, Ezra, and Hazel, with whom I share a home and my heart. Thank you to Scott, Max, Sophia, Ethan, Jess, and Austin—my cup overfilleth! And thanks, Graham Cournoyer, whose Auto Trader ad read like Dadaist poetry and who let me spend a few hours with his 1982 Buick Skylark while writing this book. Finally, thanks to Andrew Wooldridge, my sharp and generous editor.

Sara Cassidy has lived in a logging camp, a five-by-seven-foot survival shelter in the Manitoba bush, a refugee camp (as an international witness), an apartment over a downtown biker bar, in youth hostels in Canada and Scotland as well as in large, comfortable houses. In every place, she had a pen and a journal to help steer her way through.
Skylark
is her fifth book for youth.