"Skinny White Bitch"

One afternoon, a shadowy figure whispered,
 just loud enough, "skinny white bitch".
She walks where others do not go.

She knows the cuts & drug corners of the city,
searches for a house without numbers,
crossing concrete slabs sliced apart,
where broken toys & tufts of weeds survive.

A knock, the door opens to the smell of kerosene
& the monotone of the tv. She sits with mother
& son at the kitchen table. First, the easy questions,
then the ones hard to ask, even harder to answer.
She backhands a curious cockroach from her notes,
written in cryptic shorthand, till the pages full.

The afternoon shadows lengthen,
she says good-bye to this family.
Her task: to meld the facts with her intuitions,
the question: salvageable or lost to the streets?
The "skinny white bitch" drives into the twilight.