After reading Brendan J. Lyons’s September 22, 2024 Times Union article, “ 'A puzzle piece' led to breakthrough in Baby Moses murder case”

I heard the funeral birds 6 months into a lie-in/
kaleidoscoped into a year of staring at the/
same peeling paint flap in a corner of my room. Upon it the shadow/
cast by an old cobweb still projects the film of/
a Lifetime movie romance, decades in the/
weaving, now abandoned like bad acorn spit out by Washington Park’s/
winter scurry. My beloved/estranged and I walked there, up to the statue of Moses/ back in May, when dandelions and tulips still spilt from the monument/ and into our mouths. I swear it happened, but they said, no, it was nothing but a/ story, one I crafted to extract my own venom from another’s pair/ of eyes. Theirs stared at mine for the last time and said–not an acorn of/ grace in their crinkling–, seems like it finally got to you, the city/
dimmed the light in yours. I wanted to slap them. Love mine anyway! But the workers/ drilled holes on the other side of my wall. A truer story; they’ve drilled all year. And had/ I left sooner, the way I planned down to the milligram, I wouldn’t have discovered/ that the workers worked through Christmas. That they could hear me cry through the/ wall. Finally, my Pyramus in a 10-man suit! But next to me in bed, in place of them, an infant’s/ ghost. We read last season’s news, let the snow pile up on the car and my body–/
If I perish, I perish, I said, like Queen Esther said, and waited 3 days, wrapped/ in weighted cold and blue syrup, sinking like Peter when he lost his faith in/ Jesus. In 1997, Keri Mazzuca lived 5 blocks away from Washington Park, a/ mile away from where I read, sleep, and think I’ll die. She smothered her baby blue,/ left him by Moses, immolated. A wish for 27 years, granted. I sweat into my pillowcase/
a mile away from the bathtub where Keri used the towel he was tucked/
in, to drown out baby’s breath. I remember asking my mother why she didn’t leave me in/ the Primordial mall, why she pushed me, floatie-free, into this pool. She said, don’t ever in a million years ask that again. I wish she’d slapped me. Love me indignant, harder. The flower/ I kept from the walk up to Moses could have existed in stories beyond my bed./

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