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74 Saint Bruise What I call the small fan of violet threads under my breasts. I don’t know why my bruise never faded. It’s been years since I was fifteen and helped Joey Seal steal the four-foot statue of the Virgin from St. Mary’s Church. Years since the Virgin’s forehead scarred my sternum to show how colorfully a girl can go creeping through a church’s side garden with a boy in leather who liked to suck eyeballs. Who suggested we hop the wall and wiggle the statue from its fishpond, dump her body in the mulberries by the allnight bakery whose sign would glow when the donuts rose hot from the oven. We dropped acid until she turned 75 red in the neon, until the scrape on my chest—from where her forehead rested as we carried the stone—stung like the memory already taking root, taking its two licheny inches in bruise. Once, as we sat in the figscented bath, another man asked me what the mark meant, the scar I touch each night as I stand near the sliding mirror. If I comb my wet hair it hangs just above the flush of blurred nerves, the old border, those forked veins: that door which remains open for the patron saint of what breaks, that ghost of what’s always been broken. ...

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