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For though I’m small, I know many things, And my body is an endless eye Through which, unfortunately, I see everything. —GLORIA FUERTES, “NOW”
He curled around China like a fingernail around flesh.
Seeing him broke the cocoon of my rib cage, and my heart unfurled to fly.
Manny had black curly hair, black eyes, and white teeth, and his skin was the color of fresh-cut wood at the heart of a pine tree.
Manny’s face was smooth and only his body spoke: his muscles jabbered like chickens.
The wind moves a little in the tops of the trees, and then dies away, like a person leaving a room.
Because everyone else was crying, I clung like a monkey to Mama, my legs and arms wrapped around her softness, and I cried, love running through me like a hard, blinding summer rain. And then Mama died, and there was no one left for me to hold on to.
“To give life”—Skeetah bends down to China, feels her from neck to jaw, caresses her face like he would kiss her; she flashes her tongue—“is to know what’s worth fighting for. And what’s love.” Skeetah rubs down her sides, feels her ribs.
through miles of woods, lonely houses like possums in the dark, half caught and then left behind by the headlights.
suddenly there is a great split between now and then, and I wonder where the world where that day happened has gone, because we are not in it.
I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive, left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sun-starved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and salt-burned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is the mother we
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