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  • Twenty-one poems, from A Selected History of Her Heart
  • Carole Simmons Oles (bio)

Prologue: Blood Ritual, Age Ten

Arlene lit the match and she held the needle in the flame until it flickered out. They laughed, fixing the spell when each in turn produced a jewel at her fingertip and they squeezed them into one. Amen. Now some part Jew she wasn’t just her self.

Why Morocco

1961–1962

Sweet sixteen, entering commuter college her worst fear had been she’d never leave her parents’ three-room apartment with the el a block away, trains screeching in and out of her sleep. Never sit on a sandy beach by the sea instead of the roof, tar soaking up heat, flocks of tv antennas overhead. She had to defang that never. [End Page 19]

The international schools agency offered a U.S. Army base in Beirut or The American School in Tangier, English as a Foreign Language— before ESL courses, books, labs, tapes. She chose pulse, the heart of the city.

The marble staircase with wrought iron railing curved to her second-floor classroom: high ceilings, balcony, Mediterranean breeze. Ten students ages 12 to 16 stood as one to greet her in various accents and she spoke their names

Abdelatif Consuelo ElizabethFarid Fernando Gerardo JosefinaIndra Mary-Gloria Samuel

Let us begin.

Mimosa

Latin paints its essence: mimus mime and pudicus bashful, modest, chaste.

On the Old Mountain, spilling down to the sea Mimosa pudica, fragrant as dreams of escape.

Eyes closed, she buried her face in the globes of yellow. Tender leaves shrank from her praise. [End Page 20]

How to sense when they’re touched as blessing, when to shrink guarding fragrance and gold?

Pursued

She’d just returned from the souk when crazy love boy appeared from New York

miniaturized in the eye of her door. Behind it she stood holding her breath.

She waited all day for him to quit the hill where he sat staring

at her apartment, finally leaving just before dark to catch the ferry out.

Son of an Immigrant Butcher in Queens

where they both grew up, he visited, rented a Simca, took her to Tetouan, bargained for babouches for her sister and taught her to drive a manual shift.

Thanks to him she could rent the blue vw journey south with her colleague Ruth [End Page 21] 40 years older, already retired from a Jersey City school.

Thanks to him for having played Mozart, led her to his mit prof at a class on The Marriage of Figaro. Would there be marriage for them?

He was a man who fed others, a man who mapped cities, people. A mind like a laser—before lasers. The temperature of a group of particles

is indicative of the level of excitation. He was never cold, even in harsh New England winters wore only a sports coat.

So why not? She wanted to hide, he wanted to seek. Once they had lain beside each other. They would stay childhood sweethearts.

Object Lesson: Trying to Translate

Curious American like the victim, she took notes on small onionskin sheets marked Paris-Dakar an Eiffel Tower forming the i, both words embracing a globe. March 24, 1962—more than two years [End Page 22] after the crime, the girl’s belongings lined up at the front of the cold room.

The trial for rape and murder was conducted in French, language of government and business still. Radiateurs inutiles, she wrote, practicing. Personal representative of the Minister of Islamic Affairs, the reporter from Al Istiqlal leaned forward. Where were the American papers?

The prosecutor circled, an eagle with white ruff around his polished head, well-tended, long white talons ready to tear. The judge’s cheeks had collapsed but his mouth wouldn’t be moved. Closing in, the lawyer cited the length of cord found at the scene. The psychiatrist gave his expert opinion.

The accused, English but named Moore had eyes afloat on dark half-moons. Did a guard make that red spot on his cheek, a spider bite while he slept? Could he sleep? As ordered, Moore rose to confront the witness. Their eyes met...

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