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SESTINAS WITH IRREGULAR TELEUTONS CATHERINE BOWMAN Mr. X All my Ex’s live in Texas, so the country song says and no excuses, it’s mostly true for me too that the spade-shaped extra big state with its cotton lints and Ruby Reds holds the crux of my semi-truck-I’ve-never-had-any-kind-of-luck-deluxesuper -high-jinx-born-to-be-unhappy-if-it-ain’t-broken-don’t-fixit loves, for example, there was the snakebit mudlogger who fixed himself forever diving off that hexed bridge, and that foxy expatriot who imported exotic parrots, he’d pump me up with his deluxe stuff, the salesman who felt so guilty for the wide-eyed excuses he told his wife that at the Big Six Motel just outside Las Cruces he spent the afternoon hunched over Exodus, bemoaning the sin of extramarital sex, and the harmonica player, his mouth organ could extract an oily bended blues, on sticky nights we’d hit the 12th hole pond with a fix of Dos Equis and a hit of Ecstasy and I’d wrap my legs around his lanky crux, as moonlight cut through the water like a giant X-ray, his Hohner ax glistened in and out. And then there was the feckless shrink. No excuse for his fixation, the tax man, the cute butcher from the Deluxe, the Kilim dealer, the defrocked priest. So what if my mother was deluxe luscious, my father with a Baptist streak, I can’t blame them, I was born just extra affectionate. Don’t ask about the abortions, and who can ever make excuses for the time I spent holed up with the Port-O-Can tycoon my friend fixed me up with, or the Mexican sculptor who made cathedral-sized onyx Xs, twisted crucifixes. Art, he quoted Marx, was history at its crux. Then there was the Ph.D. who took me to Peru and showed me Crux (the Southern Cross), Centaurus, Musca, Vela, Lupus, and another deluxe equatorial constellation that I forgot. For fun I ascribed each sparkly X a name and date, so now I have a star chart to exalt each of my extraordinary , heavenly bodies. But that night I dreamed the stars were fixed on stacks of pages: pica asterisks to indicate omissions, footnotes, excuses, explanation. I stood there, Ms. D. Giovanni, with a million excuses. Now in exile I journey on the Styx with Mr. X in our boat the Crux Criticorum. I wear an aqua slicker, he a sharkskin suit. He’s non-fiction, never incognito. We’ve got our sextant and spy manual open on our deluxe waterbed. I can just make out the tattoo above his boxers in this extra dark, there’s the curve of his back. Now we’ll break the code and go beyond X. ...

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