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 Always Girl That girl, always a string bean child fretting at her mama’s skirts. Her time will come, sorry to say. She trips across pasture tugging that grubby-toed baby doll, always blond, always girl. She hides in the corncrib that cradles puckered ears, afraid of those kernels that hang like brown teeth on wicked gums. She spins, she spins, dizzy and silly. That girl, she stands by the creek, shivering ribs and bruised and bony knees, sipping thimbles of sunshine, she does. Soon she will wake from her moon-blessed sleep, ripe with morning. That girl will find stained panties and her own worried hems. And on some porch, she will sit and sweat and squint and shuck her corn with blistered thumbs. She’ll conjure thunder and shuck that corn. ...

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