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Home Lifeexpand_moreShe had a situation where she’d lost her driver’s license for speeding.
The pain lithified to numbness, and she recalled the time of his courtship.
The first time the world demanded more of me, I was twenty-nine.
It takes a strong woman to make any sort of success in the West.
Joanie’s face was something she’d borrowed from Miró, from Picasso.
When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.
The tomatoes weren’t there. She looked again at the ground.
He was warm that way, always tender, and maybe that’s the worst part.
Take this man, Stepan. His deep mellow voice soars in my heart.
I hold out hands, empty and poor like a beggar by the temple door.
The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.
He pushed aside a photograph of a man with a knife stuck in his eye.
We spread. Kneel. We’ll come out missing parts. This we know.
“Hey, you look lost,” the hunter had said. “You better come with me.”
She wonders if he will be all right. She assumes he has four-wheel drive.
In the backyard I submerge myself in a bathtub of soil, soak with the hose.
She asked, “What’s the weirdest thing you can do with your body?”
He came into town with his big red pen and began revising us.
Who was responsible for my father not living up to expectations?
My books, I can hardly read them, they make so much sense.
They are glorious pumpkin-skinned messengers. I hate them.
And that girls came to his house all the time, cheap girls from the docks.
Love speaks in silence, on behalf of lovers too tired for words.
Her family was still poor and hungry and scared.
Hear the voice of life telling you something from the inside out.
Let’s walk down to the river, bless the paper boats and turn it all into wine.
Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.
Think how you move, how a room changes with your smallest breath.
She regarded the world calmly without the filter of her suffering.
Salt provokes, tenderizes. Your wounds, your dinner.