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90 In a Twilight Town At these hours a girl shows me the scar she earned after her father’s chainsaw bucked against her calf while he evened the backyard stumps. “It cut clear to my meat,” she says. “They had to fly me to the city.” The rough, shiny lump is not grotesque. Her leg has grown around the wound same as how trees will hatchet strikes. She still wears skirts, for now, because her body won’t be a woman’s for a few more years, and free magazine offers don’t come this far out in the country. The bald slice through one eyebrow is either from barbed wire or dog. Could have been her brother, before they sent him to that school for boys just like him. I’d like to hear about all those goldfish that never survived through winter on her parents’ porch. I’d like to know how the couch felt when it froze through. But the plane for the mail route is spinning on and this place will always be her stop. The night makes us all older, and just walking toward it, she covers her thighs with the dark. ...

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