The Girl at My Daughter’s High School Dies by Suicide

I imagine a body
on a shag rug in a not yet redone basement from the seventies 
with a brown bar and ripped bar stools.

I am in this basement throwing bar stools. 
There is grass outside I guess.

Once I was babysitting and I 
stuck one of those huge metal pins through 
the thick cloth of the double-folded diaper into the baby. 

I see my daughter fall 
from the Space Needle, six hundred and five feet
up in the air, the mesh grate gone. 
I see my son plummet off the deck of the ferry, into the deep cold strait.

This girl. 

You know that first year of their life 
when the stroller hits the curb wrong, or she screams
for four hours straight and the second floor window is right there 
so you park her in the crib, stick in earplugs 
that cost three hundred dollars, 
eat chocolate alone on the sofa? 
You know that year when you are just trying 
to keep them alive?