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KEVIN
I don’t understand anything you’re saying
 
TERESA
I’m sorry this sucked. Sorry. Sorry. I’ve stopped being able to lie. Don’t tear yourself apart over this. There’s a war coming, dude. 
 
KEVIN
What
 
TERESA
There’s a war coming. And I want you to be on the right side. I want you to be strong enough to fight. Remember your roots. You went to a school where you got wilderness training, where you spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains, and you were strong and you were one of us, and now look at you, you’re a pale American soy boy. 
 
KEVIN
A pale what
 
TERESA
Just make a decision not to be weak anymore, and stick to it.
 

In the shed the cow lies upside down mooing weakly. The men hang droplights from the ridgepole, and keeping her on her back, they spread her front and hind legs in opposite directions, tying them to opposite walls so she can’t kick. Kneeling over her swollen belly holding something that looks like a miniature fire extinguisher, the vet sprays her with antiseptic. The cow’s eyes roll, the whites showing, and she lets out faint moans, ever dwindling protests of pain and fear.

Used courtesy of the University of Iowa Press

Whitman kept all the sleepers to himself but one, & she wasn’t just a demon

in the sack. When she wasn’t sleeping by daylight, she was the demon

slinging a house shoe at her children over the front seat of the Plymouth

while simultaneously steering it between the orgasmic, careening semis &

Beetle Bug Blue, Piddiddle, Beetle Bug Black.

so mama said no running, afraid
for me: shriveled lansones, sickly.

threat of skinned shins. cherry
glow of lola’s clove cigarettes,

smoke plumes sealing my throat.
or on my cheeks, plum rashes

blooming from playing in witchwillow.
these days, I don’t run much.

but I was only seven when I broke
a girl’s front teeth. 

While I sit with all the other patients in the waiting room, I always think that I will ask Dr. Wald what exactly is happening to my eyes, but when I go into his examining room alone it is dark, with a circle of light on the wall, and the doctor is standing with his back to me arranging silver instruments on a cloth. The big chair is empty for me to go sit in, and each time I feel as if I have gone into a dream straight from being awake, the way you do sometimes at night, and I go to the chair without saying anything.

The next day I piled my possessions among the goats and chickens and boxes tied with string on the roof of a taxi brousse, squeezed in with the Senegalese passengers, and went to Dakar. I got the key to my new house, took a pregnancy test, and arranged a round-trip flight to Washington, D.C. Every Peace Corps volunteer was allowed one abortion.