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Show American Beauties for my brother Father drove me to Johns Hopkins Hospital in his ice-blue LeSabre, my patent leather shoes glossy as a magazine cover. In the ninety degree heat he held me up on the hood of the car, to squint at mother's window raving with American Beauties snapping their long necks. She closed her robe, gazed like a traveler impatient for her descending plane. Caged in your crib you were quiet most nights, fingering the paper fish swimming in air, their shadows circling the ceiling. Sometimes I lifted you cupping your head in my palm so that your skull wouldn't slip out of place. Everything was new to you, even your hand that you fluttered from side to side as if it were a Chinese fan. The maples billowed out reddening over the rusted-out swimming pool, then shed their leaves like something they couldn't be bothered with. Soon after the first snow mother came home, her hair streaked gold. In the polaroid father took our faces surface small and flat as the charms hooked onto her bracelet. |