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His hand & the
towel on my mouth, the forgetting—like the old
Jewish story, how in the second before the sperm enters the egg,
the soul sees her whole life & chooses it, all of it. In a second of
the second, before the soul comes down, an angel slaps her
on the mouth, & she forgets everything she knows, everything
chosen: the memory pool, a wheel with the objects
everyone dreams. Mexico coming home with you to El Paso,
at 14, so lonely on the military base, desert & tumbleweeds—
the scratchiest hairdos angry and free-rolling in the backyard,
endless like the moon—one friend, Belinda, buying Skinny Dip
cologne, blue eye shadow from the PX, but no photographs
not one, as if I wore an invisible cloak the whole time, aching
when I heard a motorcycle in the night, or sat in the right-hand
lane of an eighth-grade classroom, wearing a blue ring
from Mexico, I only crossed the border twice, but it’s gone
or hidden like everything else right here with me all the time
I’ve been looking for it.
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