Sightreading

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His name's Natan. Hers—Ventura.
I say they're my grandparents
but they will never even imagine me.

I imagine them separated into lines.
The women, the men. There they are
in a sea of strangers. Speechless.

Ladino, their mother tongue,
is no mother.  She will not tuck the blankets
under their chins at night. She is a flat tire

that gets them nowhere while all around them
people are squealing a language of trains
chafing to a halt. Metal of the wheel

on the metal of the rail. Soft whines
pealing into high-pitched fricatives. Their lines
meander like S's snaking a field made barren

from footfall. Their scalps are closely shaven.
They are holding their arms in V' s
that end in splayed palms to cover

what they can of their naked bodies. Ventura
scans and scans the groups of children
like a speedreader in desperate search

of her own familiar characters. Natan prays
for a twist in the plot. And the building they see
shrouded in the distance? They decipher its meaning

like an ancient code, entertain
multiple interpretations: warm showers,
rest stop, the four corners of their own wood bunks?

Natan, Ventura, my faceless lovelies,
my hope-filled unreliable narrators
will never bring themselves to concede

to their epilogue, their final guttural stop.