for an infant buried in a Jewish cemetery
in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania

Her namesake may have a home in the suburbs.
Keeping her name alive in those suburbs, she
sleeps with her husband, plays catch with her
kids, the baby girl a floating thought unthought.

So Rosa rests far from those suburbs, headstone
rooted in grass not of the suburbs, shrouded
behind twigs and vines, playing hide and seek,
grownup headstones tolerating the pest of a rock.

If I could talk to her namesake in the suburbs,
take her to coffee in the suburbs, I’d show her
shots of Rosa’s tiny roof of a house, denuded
of twigs and vines I cleared when I found her.

But I don’t know where she is in the suburbs,
or if she even exists on the suburbs. There is
just me breathing immortality through Rosa’s
syllables of lungs, and the pebble I left behind.

She is my daughter now.