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“Don’t go so fast,” I called, but my father always forgot. Helpless, I reached to clutch his coattails until his hand surrounded mine and towed me on. What knowledge of me did his hand record? What angers were given to my childish keeping — to await this instant, years later, when I’m reproached: “Go slow.”…

Sal delivers his four boxes of bananas just before we close. He tells me that because the temperature in Guatemala dipped down into the seventies for a couple of days Chiquita had come up 90,000 boxes short, “But I got my fruit ’cause I don’t shop around.” Sal gets a truck from Chiquita and Dole…

A man and a woman sit near each other. They do not long to be older, or younger, nor to be born in any other country, nor any other time. They are content to be where they are, talking or not      talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not      know. The man sees…

The fountain around the soldiers’ and sailors’ monument, the mist from the splashing water, the Murat theater; it was there I waited for the young man I loved, hour after hour. Often he would not come. I leaned against the walls of a candy shop, boxes of rubber chocolates in the window, behind me buses…

driving down East avenue towards downtown cardinal swooping over the car, horsechestnut flowers erect & white.      I told Jay at the bank I saw horsechestnuts in flower over the weekend, she said, “I remember when I was little we used to gather the nuts, now you don’t find them any more.” She went on but…

When I was a child of four or five, I fell out of my parents’ car one day, and they drove off and left me. I went to sleep weeping in the ditch. Later my mother came by at ten at night, and nudged me with her rhinocerous horn, found me dead, or still alive,…

From a photograph on the bedroom wall, you look toward what we cannot see. The shadow of silver trembles in its journey to nowhere. You look past us without words, a young woman we never knew. When light comes in the room, the uncompromising bed does not translate your suffering. You stare from inside the…

My wife, over food you thought of me again. How do I know? I can taste you still in this glass of water.

What if we had never married, what if just before the wedding, foreseeing the pain we would cause each other, we broke it off, goodbye. I see us meeting again after 10 years, each of us married to people we like but don’t love;      there is a deep, sober longing in your eyes, an airy…