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B U R N T H O U S E Leave the rest to the gods. —HORACE He tells his mother to go to bed. I’ll smoke, she whines, not a day all alone in her life. He’s left his book at the station, fifteen years of names and numbers. Leave, she says, leave me like an adolescent. Something from Horace here, not too consoling. While he’s out, he doesn’t hear the sirens. No one says she’s the same. His mother loved her legs. They seem to have grafted you more, he says. She raises her lush, singed brows to his face. Smell this, she says. It’s age and yourself that consumed me. The fire was mine. 63 ...

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