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13 ESPERANZA The bony black face of Esperanza archaic face of blood work, chicken slaughter, pinfeathers, salted carcasses, of hands condemned to glow in cold dreamless water, cold cement stopping the feet dead, the look of work and strike, one more picket with a slag foot rhythm that says, we won't kill ourselves, we can walk this line forever, or what amounts to forever... Esperanza is sick of forever. On the strict iron of the fire escape, she bristles like chilblains in sunlight resting her bones against the warm brick wall. Against the world, which is legal and Anglo, she yanks a lavender vinyl collar across her face. Not like an ostrich, but an old opera. They want her soul her bread 14 her food stamps, welfare check, slave pay, her 30 dollar a week union dole. Her man, her coat. Even at night she pulls the night over her head. Even her cunning gets carried away on the wings of her innocence. The cold damp air is killing her. She's picking up what she can, flying back to Puerto Rico, wherever it is— a thin black bird good moming'd and fed, have a pleasant trip as never before, never again, in the belly lap of a huge silver bird... coming down into factory clouds of sunset chemicals, flecks of ash, the queasy blue wrinkled bay water, skimming and overshooting rows of stunted pineapples withering in the field 15 a few shreds of fading color, the same earth she had come from, gone to, and left. A swollen superport rose from the sea, draining the sea. A third of the women had been sterilized. Limousines sped past vacant lots. Gardenias. A mountain of nickel, gouged face... Esperanza shivered to bone in the throat of restaurants, in plump bodega hearts, and in the labyrinth of refineries —high flying torches burning off the nightin the sublime filaments of computers that could not swallow her, and cannot spit her out. Now all the hand-slapped guitars put on smiles of glass. They have a mouthful 16 of sharp dark bird, petty thievery, acrid envy; Esperanza fills their mouths with blood. ...Unborn skies come to stare: at broken palm fronds, broken words, at what seem to be hands wrung like flags of shame. To stare, and wonder how so much wealth made so much poverty so much alone, how so much misery made Esperanza who expected nothing scavenge in the cracks of her own hands. This thing that existed only to bury her face in the dust of Puerto Pobre. ...

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