Through persimmon curtains, she slept away her infancy. / Waves specked the day-bed where she dreamt / her mother’s best…

When Toni and Lola have a good run with the oilmen, we all get to go up to Dallas for steaks and Neiman Marcus and drink thirty dollar cocktails made with real gold. Tina finished paying her forty-eight blowjobs for the red mustang convertible and it's hers now, fair and square, and Tina and Lola in front and Toni and me in back and there's no need for a hotel because we're not ever going to sleep again. Sleeping is for people who haven't been paid.

"And then it was May, time to let the grapes grow and fish anchovies;" or so it went for centuries in the town of Collioure, which attributed its escape…

My father / carried me often like a dead deer // on his shoulders up the stairs to bed, / my arms and legs gripped before his body, // my fallen neck bobbing