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The movie is entertaining and intriguing. At four points during it I rotate my eyes to observe Rebecca. The monitor is mirrored on her glasses and behind them her eyes are very wide. Although I am a more experienced programmer, I am certain her ideas on the movie are more complex than mine.

HELENA: You okay?

THE GIRL: Jus’ let me sleep, I say I fine, whot number I is?

HELENA: Whot number whot?

THE GIRL: Whot number wife? He say dere is a rainkin’.

HELENA: Ah, ah… number four, you number four.

THE GIRL: Whot number is she?

HELENA: Tree.

THE GIRL: So who Number Two?

“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.

       He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that. “Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.

        She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.

           And the sky!

Nooned with the steadfast blue enthusiasm

Of an empty nursery.

Crooked lizards grassed in yellow shade.

The grass was lizarding,

Green and on a rampage.

Shade tenacious in the crook of a bent stem.

Noon. This noon –

Skyed, blue and full of hum, full of bloom.

The grass was lizarding

From a side lane soft with lunar mulch

and thistledown I saw them, clipped alone

on a clothesline, a pair of diaphanous panties

as wide as an elephant’s forehead.

I sighed across the boy-mown lawn

and they shook as though they shed blessings

to the moon and her tongue-tied exiles.

Who would dare pour such panties

along his arms and throat? A murderer, maybe.

The Milky Way was pavement

compared to their luxury. I knew

I wouldn’t outwalk their whispers that night.

Next morning my feet felt like mallets.

I was back in the world where people

wear out, embarrassed by beautiful things,

and a garment fit for a goddess is nothing but big.