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51 Menlo The town is a road cut from leaves, the 7UP sign the old kind with the rainbow of flowers. I bring you with me because I think maybe they’ll hire me to teach their last children in the school with the desks swept back for summer, the closets packed with brown-papered textbooks, their grandparents’ names on the inside covers. I think we can live in the one-room house for the teacher, and in winter it won’t snow so close to the coast but it will still be cold enough and we can light the stove. You’ll drive to Aberdeen or Ocean Shores and get work in a restaurant where you’ll spend lunches frying up fish. Sometimes you’ll lift a live crab from the tank in the lobby, all the locals shifting their eyes like portraits from the gray sea and the gray sky to the crab as you walk back to the waiting pot. They go back to their windows, silenced by the seamless dark lowering. At night, we’ll sleep with the woods behind us, the forest hollowed. The trees are cropped like cancered 52 heads—no scarves covering nothing where there should be something, only sky where they stood with their arms shoved up, leaves shaking, their eyes full of owls. ...

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