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And the light hairs strung along your wrists. As if your shoulders. As if the muscular turn of your hips. As if I could tilt your mouth to this dent in my chest. So, bit by bit, it becomes unmistakable. This not knowing how to say. As if I had already broken into the last room and found the words still not English. As if being Xesh were not call enough. Why stay here to be American? Where what is exactly sexual has no country. Let’s go. Whole words. Whole worlds slow between us. Trying to pronounce themselves. Unlost. The body, the one sacred book. My hand. My hands know so little of your hands. The names of pleasure held in chains taken in ships. Rue Beaurepaire, I and II Marilyn Hacker july 2002 I On a wide side-street that leads to the canal job-seeking Meridional families, retired mail-clerks, philoprogenitive Chinese textile workers, Tunisian grocers have found an issue everyone agrees Hacker / Rue Beaurepaire, I and II 231 to disagree on—IV drug users’ right to a safe haven among neighbors: a hostel instead of a hospital ER, with co¤ee, washing-machines and showers, a Moroccan intern who serves as a nurse, weekly rap groups, small tables to converse across. From balconies, spanning the street hang homemade banners, spray paint on white sheets: send them to another street—not ours. II The banners across the rue Beaurepaire are gone, those “for” and also those “against” the shop-front drop-in center. Someone’s rinsed away the angry slogans spray-painted across the elegant discreet façade stenciled with quotations from Voltaire, Sartre, Aragon, Camus. The mayor stayed out of it: nobody was convinced and rumor once more outweighed evidence. (The school’s one street over—really, next door! Don’t they have AIDS? Dealers will come. They’ll steal . . . ) They won’t be driven into the canal; just relocated to the Gare du Nord a site indicative of transience— —according to the ACT UP bulletin. But on a brilliant summer afternoon below the white, newly anonymous façade, the door was open nonetheless. In the doorway, two women and a man were talking. One woman, I guessed, might be a client, so I went on past and sat by the canal, which, in the sun, looked less like bodily eºuvium; a few discreet minutes later, returned. The young man, dressed in orange, fresh on brown/ olive skin, was the intern who’d been there last June. They’re backed now by la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme; keep clinic hours, but quietly. They’ve learned. 232 part 11 parading poetry ...

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