Calling Collect

See the child, standing in front of a payphone. Picking up the receiver, dialing, hanging up. His ankles dusty, legs, burnt brown, still tubby like a baby’s. Pain long gone from his gaunt face, streaks of tears that parted the dirt and snot on his nose and cheeks, chest bare, almost naked, but for his sagging underwear. His arms strung with muscle, his mouth frowned as he lipped his name into the phone. It was almost agony how he sat there against the post of the phone, knees together, toes gripping the sidewalk, wishing the guts of metal would ring. I imagined some kind of trouble, long nights breathing in the dirt, bruised remnants of clutches from shoulder to face, forehead lumped up where knuckles struck, when his face rung, knees buckled. I imagined a dawn lit house when the shrugs and pitch of sleep told him to scout his own food in the half-hinged icebox. When pained groans of vice sent him to the phone with emergency, not knowing what number to punch, what things to say on the street corner, when the cars revved, engines rumbled deep.