Nancy Scott

ON THE DAY A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD DISAPPEARED IN OJAI, CALIFORNIA

one person knew her body was in a drain pipe
in a culvert at marker 44 on Maricopa Highway

the teen may have thought it hip to snort coke, drink wine
coolers, and have sex with a 22-year-old married man

she was warned he was armed, liked to prey on young girls
she snuck out, got into his green truck, and ended up dead

at sixteen I dated a 22-year-old Army sergeant, we smoked
Luckies, drank beer, and necked, that’s as far as we went

it's possible he’d killed Korean children by accident, perhaps
on command. I didn’t ask, he’d never tell. He got promoted

returned home with medals; the other will die in state prison
does it matter whether she lay in a drain or rice paddy

or under a bridge where parents threw their bodies across her
dead is dead


Nancy reads "On the day a fourteen-year-old disappeared...":



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Nancy confesses: "This poem was compiled from two newspaper reports: one from Ojai, California, dated December, 1998, and the other about an episode where American troops slaughtered South Korean civilians at a bridge at No Gun Ri in 1950."

NANCY SCOTT is the current managing editor of U.S.1 Worksheets, the journal of the U.S.1 Poets' Cooperative in New Jersey. She is the author five books of poetry, her most recent, On Location, a collection of ekphrastic poems about works of art, was published by March Street Press in 2011. Her work has appeared in print journals, such as Slant, Mudfish, Witness, and New York Quarterly, and online at Segue, qarrtsiluni, Pemmican, and The BluePrint Review. More at www.nancyscott.net.