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INTERROGATION How did you get here in the wet garden on your bloody knees, and where is your mother’s brown dress smelling of nickels and butter? Why is your father yelling from his bedroom window, and what of the gun? Why can’t you untangle your ankles from the cucumber vines? How does it feel to press your small, hot cheek to their leaves? Can you hear the evening sprinklers start up like gossip over the dry lawns? Soon the whole world will be shining with lies— doesn’t that make it easier? Can you feel the tall pines leaning away, closing the clouds like white curtains? And the neighbors— where is the old woman who always keeps one yellow eye on her nectarine tree? Why do you dream of finding the corpses? Why do your father’s eyes fill up with blackness, and what of the gun? Why do you press your hand to your chest when he aims? Don’t you know it won’t keep him from shooting? And where is your mother’s brown dress? Can’t it hear you crying? Why won’t it come home? When his bullets pierce the tree instead of your body, can you sense your face going suddenly calm as the scent of the neighbor’s lilac drifts toward your pulse in the garden and hangs itself over your head  as if it had prayed for you all of its life and finally, finally found you? How do you know, without the words to say it, that you are the summation of a lifetime of desire? And when you know, do the stars emerge from blackness, or arrive like shots in the sky?  ...

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