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83 Ozone Alert Day Heat like a caul I can’t see out of, wading past the church with its burnished dome, the florist and Polish deli, past a robin’s bones picked and drying in the road. I burned all morning reading, I burn in my looking. Love should stretch widely across all space and should be as equally distributed, Simone Weil wrote. A small girl tiptoes down the stoop, away from her grandmother’s cursing, sings, Adieu, adieu, es mucho mucho gusto, to the Chinese worry balls sliding in her hands, trickling their metal bells. Taught to speak to no one, she multiplies among the daisies and black-eyed Susans, milkweed pods nodding on the fence. A woman shuffles by in a headwrap and long dress. She presses a handkerchief to the darkness of her neck, pulls her collar open to a wide raw wound, moaning softly, oh. I am close now, I can see blood beading like burnt sugar on her puckered skin. Love the one about whom you know nothing, who could be lying naked, bleeding, unconscious in the road. 84 Clouds dissolve in the eye of this heat’s needle. Tin flashes in the woman’s glance. I should walk home quickly now, bring back water and a clean cloth. Is it love, I wonder, only when it’s pulled live and aching through fear? ...

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