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The irritable traffic pecks soothingly at the windows of our loft, those windows whose thin glass has so long needed dusting that their delicate grapitic grayness seems internal, a shade of cathedral glass. The cafeteria neon two stories be low rhythmically stains them rose. My vast canvases-so oddly expensive as raw materials, so oddly worthless trans muted into art-with sharp rectangular shoulders hulk into silhouette against the light. Your breathing keeps time with the slow rose. Your solemn mouth has relaxed in sleep and the upper lip displays the little extra racial button of fat like a bruise blister. Your sleep contains i
Hey. Listen. Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you, I want to have a wised-up shoe-polish face taut as a drum at the cheekbones and wear great opaque anonymous-making sunglasses at three a.m. in a dim lavender cellar and forget everything but the crooning behind my ribs. But I ca
Forgive me, for I do love you, we fit. Like a Tibetan lama I rise out of myself above the bed and see how we make, yin and yang, a person between us. But at the hour in the afternoon when my father and I would be heading home in the car, I glance around at the nest we have made, at the floor boards polished by our bare feet, at the continents of stain on the ceiling like an old and all-wrong discoverer’s map, at the earnestly bloated canvases I conscientiously cover with great streaks straining to say what even I am begi
Lying awake beside you in the rose-touched dark, I wake on a morning long ago, in Vera Hummel’s guest bedroom. Her room shone in the aftermath of the storm. My dreams had been a bent extension, like that of a stick thrust into water, of the last waking events-the final mile staggering through the unwinding storm; my father’s beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and whi
The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pi
Mrs. Hummel came in from the front room wearing a pi