Beauty in Adversity
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Beauty in Adversity
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beneath the granary, shirt snagged on a nail
in a subway headed to god-knows-where in a country where I do not know how to speak by the crush of a man whose beery breath suffocates until I succumb searching and searching for my car in a parking lot that triples and triples in size until I am a speck—an ant wavering between grains of sand—and just before I disappear, my baby girl cries and reaches for me, but I cannot hold on to her, so she falls and falls and vanishes into the darkness… |
She never cried when she was born.
I remember her skin, soft as crushed petunias, how they placed her on my breast so I could say goodbye. She never suffered, but I will never stop. This pain will never end. |
the damp of dew between bare toes,
the ozone smell of thunderstorms in June, an old lover’s hot breath quickening against my ear, the tang of a margarita, the crunch of its salted rim, fresh beignets for breakfast my grandmother’s wheeze after her laughing spells the wisp of my daughter’s hair against my chin, how I placed a snippet in the locket around my neck so we’d never have to part. |