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78 Self-Portrait in a Plate-Glass Window Selma Steam rises from my plate, chicken and greens and black-eyed peas, and in the window where I can look beneath the honeydew rind or sliver moon of scalp through my own reflected eyes to the sidewalk and the lot beyond then back to the dim interior where the owner turns from his tv mystery back to me. It’s the right address, though the name has changed, and he must be asking, as I am, am I where I’m supposed to be? A few doors up—I can almost see it— a plaque remembers James Reeb, the reverend, who’d come to march and last ate in this café. It was Walker’s, then. Klansmen watched across the street, waiting for the collar, for the face to emerge— three of them, maybe four, with pipes and bats in the door of a grocery someone demolished years ago. 79 Eyes down, I’m working to the blank plate and the questions that have to follow— Where you from? What you after?— even if no one says a thing. The quiet holds them the way dark will hold all color and one memory will look like another and staying will seem stranger than having come. We’ll rise, then, the glass between us, one in the dusk, one inside, close enough to feel the café’s warmth radiating into the town and the cool March evening reaching into the room. We’ll walk toward the door and become one and slide off the glass, leaving only the window with its inscription of moonlight and clouds tomorrow will rub almost entirely away. ...

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