and saw your face abruptly break open and

glow with joy. “Baby,” you said,

coming toward me, hands out and

covered with tiny delicate bubbles like seeds.

My Father’s Breasts

Their soft surface, the polished silk of the hair

running down them delicately like

water. I placed my cheek—once,

perhaps—upon their firm shape,

my ear pressed against the black

charge of the heart within. At most

once—yet when I think of my father

I think of his breasts, my head resting

on his fragrant chest, as if I had spent

hours, years, in that smell of black pepper and

turned earth.

The Takers

Hitler entered Paris the way my

sister entered my room at night,

sat astride me, squeezed me with her knees,

held her thumbnails to the skin of my wrists and

peed on me, knowing Mother would

never believe my story. It was very

silent, her dim face above me

gleaming in the shadows, the dark gold

smell of her urine spreading through the room, its

heat boiling on my legs, my small

pelvis wet. When the hissing stopped, when the

hole had been scorched in my body, I lay

crisp and charred with shame and felt her

skin glitter in the air, her dark

gold pleasure unfold as he stood over

Napoleon’s tomb and murmured This is the

finest moment of my life.

The Pact

We played dolls in that house where Father staggered with the

Thanksgiving knife, where Mother wept at

noon into her one ounce of

cottage cheese, praying for the strength not to

kill herself. We kneeled over the

rubber bodies, gave them baths

carefully, scrubbed their little

orange hands, wrapped them up tight,

said goodnight, never spoke of the

woman like a gaping wound

weeping on the stairs, the man like a stuck

buffalo, baffled, stunned, dragging

arrows in his hide. As if we had made a

pact of silence and safety, we kneeled and

dressed those tiny torsos with their elegant

belly-buttons and minuscule holes

high on the buttock to pee through, and all that

darkness in their open mouths, so that I

have not been able to forgive you for giving your

daughter away, letting her go at

eight as if you took Molly Ann or

Tiny Tears and held her head

under the water in the bathinette

until no bubbles rose, or threw her

dark rosy body on the fire that

burned in that house where you and I

barely survived, sister, where we

swore to be protectors.

The Derelict

He passes me on the street, his hair

matted, skin polished with grime,

muttering, suit stained and stiffened—

and yet he is so young, his blond beard like a

sign of beauty and power. But his hands,

strangely flat, as if nerveless, hang and

flap slightly as he walks, like hands of

someone who has had polio, hands

that cannot be used. I smell the waste of his