A Letter to Foster Kids

You live out of worn down bags,

calluses make a home in between each finger that grips the handle of your suitcase you carry your childhood in.

Toting it from home to home

you never seem to inhabit properly anyways.

You bathe in the smell of strangers and ambiguity

You look like a document of the state.

“Case 14” engraved in both wrists.

Legality written across your faces.

You base your importance off papers that are in the folder of caseworker after caseworker

because that is the only thing caretakers seem to care about.

You wake up everyday

Hearts mimick the pounding.

Poverty beats you

deeper and deeper into a hellish state society surpasses.

You scavenge the floor of pantry after pantry just trying to get by.

Tongue twisted. Trapped under seeking better, but better has ever been better

You can’t predict what will happen in the next home of havoc.

And secrets sew your lips together.

Blood soaks into your pores and down your chin

You see caseworker after caseworker

Each one who comes in contact are burned by the hurt in your soliceless stare

So they leave.

Like everyone else.

Your only sense of permanence is the illness that never refuses to abandon you.

The only home you've ever really inhabited is depression.

You are choked by the weight that hangs from the back of your throat dripping lead into your stomach every time the state calls you by a name you wish everyone would just forget

because they have made you their foreigner of existing.

Your parents are padlock people without a password

You say that family has a negative connotation to it,

they'll never call you.

You have adopted prevention from provision

because it's always been refused

You ask once and your flesh screams as a cigarette presses deep into your skin

You just want a sense of control

& you have it….

You have control to be you..

You epitomize resilience

You have stolen the grit from the bars that promised to remain.

You live in the system that does not foster.

You live in the system that falters.

Unless you refuse to let it.

You can do it.