(Where the woman in the iron lung breathes out every person she’s ever met, a big breath, like it’s cold and she’s pretending to smoke.) I said I’m dead you put blankets on my iron lung said Must be cold you’re always cold Dead I said again you said…
Sometimes, after my daily dose of radiation, I would stop at a small bath store near the hospital to buy a bar of soap, perhaps, or a bottle of bath gel. I liked the little shop; it was holding its own among the retro hippie emporia of the neighborhood, no hint yet of tea tree…
The first time it happened he assumed something had crawled into her fur—a hornet, maybe, or a spider (it was a chill day in October, so it might have been seeking warmth)—or that the dog had somehow lodged a shard of glass in her hair while rolling in the dirt. He’d been sitting in the…
What a name to call your sister—Nada: Nothing—word I’d learned in Spanish, where d sounds like th, Natha, two-thirds of the way to Nathalie where, in French, the th sounds like t, as in Nativity: Birth, the opposite of Nothing, though all who are born return to it. Nada—the word contagious, even Mom fizzing laughter…
I am in Dublin having dinner with an Irish man of whom I am quite fond. “Am I wrong in saying your family owned a sweet shop?” I ask him. “Well, it was more than a sweet shop. It was a place that made all sorts of candies and some small cakes and what you…
It is so and so and not the dusty world who drops. It is their mother and not the dusty world who drops them. Why I imagine her so often empty-handed as houseboats’ distant lights rise and fall on the far ripples— I do not know. I know that darkness. Have stood on that bridge…
If description is a living thing, dark cherry hair and glass eyes, tilted away—I want to say something that will look at me. If to memorize is to adore and cannot afford distraction or a socket neck that rotates the head away, if death is turning away, with long brown human hair, revolving like a…
César Vallejo, Arago Clinic, Paris, Holy Friday April 15, 1938 It was you, César, they killed to the base of your forefinger, you. Certainly they shot Pedro Rojas too. No doubt Juana Vasquez was killed. The killers, poor also, were skilled. And Emilio, they shot him, in the back of the neck, after they made…
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