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Sit beside me. Old country, I am hopeful and troubadour.

I became a symbol of freedom, a miracle who had escaped the Devil.

The small, inadequate marks follow the outline, things left behind.

I am going to relate to you the most lamentable love affair of my life.

What small song do you sing under your breath that is only for you?

With your hands in the air you held an infant tightly, trying to save it.

Of all she taught me I like best the lore of spray-on cologne.

Anything can happen because everything happens in New York.

Her body had become a scale, a device for measuring grief.

If the kind hearts had fat purses, how much better everything would go!

Ink to paper, she is inventory, has a price tag. A piece to catalog.

She wags her index finger so furiously that I’m certain it will snap off.

She’s coming back, her arms full of the flowers I gave her once a year.

How bright and eager they appear, how ready to get started.

Men can’t sense like that. Or won’t. Even a father don’t dare get that close.

Some days it seems like enough to look in the glass for glazed relief.

I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the Other.

Grant had a lot of buttons on that coat—when he wore it.

Then came “the sea of trouble” as he crumpled his bank statement.

He would sneak into my room, we would have sex, he would sneak out.

What were the unsafe things to say even in a thirty-year marriage?

I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife.

Though I’ve never killed anything myself, I’ve been complicit.

I sensed that a name defined who I was and would be in the future.

We didn’t think of ourselves as anything so grand as sex workers.

In my sister’s memory, an old woman chased after the oranges.

“The Sentry” taught me that all true laughter has tears behind it.

I’m a big fan of then. A novel needs a lot of thens.

Every really good book on first reading is life changing.