Just like that, as if she were a fancy
chandelier.

She is very
sassy.

The dog is big, like a man dressed in a dog suit, and runs the same way its owner does, clumsy and wild and with the
limbs flopping all over the place like untied shoes.

Out front there are twenty-one steps, all lopsided and
jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain will slide off), and when Meme’s mama calls from the doorway, Meme goes scrambling up the twenty-one wooden stairs with the dog with two names scrambling after him.

Out front there are twenty-one steps, all lopsided and jutting like crooked teeth (made that way on purpose, Cathy said, so the rain will slide off), and when Meme’s mama calls from the doorway, Meme goes
scrambling up the twenty-one wooden stairs with the dog with two names
scrambling after him.

She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby’s sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off moustache hair and if you count the white
flecks on your fingernails you can know how many boys are thinking of you and lots of other things I can’t remember now.

We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby’s brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw
brim, that’s Rosa’s Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he’s Fat Boy, though he’s not fat anymore nor a boy.

The mother’s feet, plump and polite,
descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the linoleum roses, down down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares, 5, 6, 7, blue sky.

The mother’s feet, plump and polite, descended like white pigeons from the sea of pillow, across the
linoleum roses, down down the wooden stairs, over the chalk hopscotch squares, 5, 6, 7, blue sky.

It’s Rachel who learns to walk the best all
strutted in those magic high heels.

Lucy, Rachel, me tee-
tottering like so.

Across the street in front of the
tavern a bum man on the stoop.

Across the street in front of the tavern a bum man on the
stoop.

My home isn’t far but it’s not close either, and somehow I got it in my head one day to ask my mother to make me a sandwich and write a note to the principal so I could eat in the
canteen too.

I’m no
Spartan and hold up an anemic wrist to prove it.

I’m no Spartan and hold up an
anemic wrist to prove it.

My feet
swell big and heavy like plungers, but I drag them across the linoleum floor straight center where Uncle wants to show off the new dance we learned.

I want to move like heebie-jeebie, I say picking up on the
cue.

She is the color of a bar of
naphtha laundry soap, she is like the little brown piece left at the end of the wash, the hard little bone, my sister.

So the next morning I put on the navy blue dress that made me look older and borrowed money for lunch and bus
fare because Aunt Lala said I wouldn’t get paid till the next Friday, and I went in and saw the boss of the Peter Pan Photo Finishers on North Broadway where Aunt Lala worked and lied about my age like she told me to and sure enough, I started that same day.

But I knew her sick from the disease that would not go, her legs bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones gone
limp as worms.

The top of the refrigerator busy with holy candles, some lit, some not, red and green and blue, a plaster saint and a dusty Palm Sunday cross, and a picture of the
voodoo hand taped to the wall.

Here a
pillar of bees and this a mattress of luxury.

Nobody but an
intern working all alone.

They never knew about the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the
currency exchange.

Finally I came to the last lines: “But answer came there none—and this was
scarcely odd, because they’d eaten every one .

The little wooden door that has
wedged shut the dark for so long opens with a sigh and lets out a breath of mold and dampness, like books that have been left out in the rain.

Earl is a
jukebox repairman.

They send
ferocious roots beneath the ground.

¡Ay! Mamacita, who does not belong, every once in a while lets out a cry,
hysterical, high, as if he had torn the only skinny thread that kept her alive, the only road out to that country.

My mother says to wear black so young is dangerous, but I want to buy shoes just like yours, like your black ones made out of
suede, just like those.

They don’t look down at all except to be
content to live on hills.

My mother says when I get older my dusty hair will settle and my blouse will learn to stay clean, but I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the
threshold waiting for the ball and chain.

She borrows opera records from the public library and sings with
velvety lungs powerful as morning glories.

The green metal cage, the
porcelain table top, the family that spoke like guitars.

There were sunflowers big as flowers on Mars and thick cockscombs bleeding the deep red
fringe of theater curtains.

Poke a stick in the sandy soil and a few blue-skinned beetles would appear, an avenue of ants, so many
crusty lady bugs.

She met a marshmallow salesman at a school
bazaar, and she married him in another state where it’s legal to get married before eighth grade.

“And so she
trudged up the wooden stairs, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked.”