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From " Some Spanish Verbs" After the hissed pleas, denunciations— the children just tucked in— perhaps her hand on his dress-shirt sleeve, brushed off, leaving a trace of cologne, impossible, it seemed, to wash off with plain soap, he'd go, his feet light on the gravel. In their room, she'd fall on her knees to say prayers composed to sound like praise;following her mother's warning never to make demands outright from God nor a man. On the other side of the thin wall, I lay listening to the sounds I recognized from an early age: Knees on wood, shifting the pain so the floor creaked, and a woman's conversation with the wind—that carried her sad voice out of the open window to me. And her words—if they did not rise to heaven, fell on my chest, where they are embedded like splinters of a cross I also carried. 28 Orar: To Prray ...

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