Dionisio D. Martinez

I love American newspapers, the way each section

is folded independently and believes it owns

the world. There’s this brief item in the inter-

national pages: the Chinese government has posted

signs in Tiananmen Square; forbidding laughter.

I’m sure the plastic surgeon would approve, he’d say

the Chinese will look young much longer, their faces

unnaturally smooth, but what I see (although

no photograph accompanies the story) is laughter

busting inside them. I go back to the sports section

and a closeup of a rookie in mind-swing, his face

keeping all the wrong emotions in check.

My mother the seamstress had a seamstress

of her own, like the cook who will not

eat her own recipes: nearly everything we wore

was a product of my mother’s sewing,

but she made nothing for herself.

Her seamstress, whose nickname begins

with a consonant for which there are only

approximate sounds in English,

made the dress my mother wore out of Cuba,

then again and again in exile as we unfolded

our maps of dead-end streets

and studied dictionaries filled with

the new country’s euphemisms for no and why.

He closed the deal on the night. A real

bargain, he said. And the city was reduced

to a room, the man’s constant body in bed,

the sheets glowing like phosphorus.

One flaw in the design made it possible

for an occasional body to slip in.

The sheets would glow a bit more brightly

in its presence. Each time it left, the body

would leave more of itself behind,

until there was no absence to speak of.

The man began to count on the occasional body

and its lingering presence, which he now calls

memory.  He understands that the laws

of necessity draw their own conclusions.