Chalked in childish script
on the brick wall girding
the grammar school I pass
on this steamy summer morning.

Layla was here.

How young it begins, this drive
to stake one’s place, to root
by word, by name. Layla—
child who presumably made it

through the year’s pledges
of allegiance, dodgeball games, frog
dissections, lockdown drills.
And with no rain for months, Layla

abides as if chiseled in granite,
though a school’s a sorry setting
for memorial wall; it ought to rear
not cleave. But then ought’s

a more vaporous word
than gun, than run, more smoke
than steel or etched name,
dates, epitaph. Layla was here.

Is she still or has she fled—
hiding, seeking, girlhood
glinting, cremains to diamonds,
after-bodied in chalk, word, brick, haze?