Behind the Stove
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      In those days I could make myself as small as a seed:
      I followed the anxious cucaracha so closely she thought I was her moon shadow or lover. She was in search of a perfect place. She loved to zip into the darkness of my father’s box of books, she adored the smell of Huxley and Dickinson and Piaget’s red-wine dust jacket. When my brothers were asleep, she slipped behind the stove and into the walls where I saw mice and dust and rivers and coke furnaces and the long glass coolers at the Allegheny County Morgue. The inner walls of the Projects were endless: I saw barges with coal like pyramids, I saw badgers and a dead black bear beside the road where Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was singing and walking through the snowfall. I saw my mother’s father signing papers in Chile. I was walking through a maze of grape vines with the purple fruit hanging in clusters the shape of South America. I saw my other grandfather dying of cancer under a sheet with his eyes closed and his dirty glasses on. Or was I a yellow canary flying through a mine?
      When the cucaracha stopped, I stopped. She tipped her thorax toward the seam of a gas pipe. We laid a string of perfect eggs.
      It was already dawn.

 

from Autobiography of So-and-so: Poems in Prose by Maurice Kilwein Guevara
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