Yesterday, Kendra was just like everyone else. The two small, delicate bulges in her face, from where tears are born, carried no other purpose save a distant bio‐history and some rumored potential. The world was a place of darkness, of dreams sometimes so vivid with smell and taste and sound they seemed alive, of sensory projections based on the touch of her fingers along others’ faces and clothes and surfaces. Yesterday, all she had was touch, just like everyone else in the Home, like everyone she’d ever known. But today… Today was something different, unbelievable, unfounded, a myth. Today, Kendra found purpose, both old and new, from the bulges in her head, for she began to cry without reason as she began also to far‐touch.

It’s a Saturday morning, Mid‐1953, and the Hit Parade is on the radio, with Eddie Fisher crooning: “Oh, my pa‐pa, to me he was so wonderful.” I think of Grandpa and hum along as I sadly and madly chew and snap a mouthful of gum. I’m standing in front of the mirror over the low bureau I share with my sisters, inspecting my new body in the smallest jeans I’ve ever worn. I’m a fraction of the size I was, but I’d like to be still skinnier, so I hold in my stomach and stick out my Marilyn Monroe assets as I brush my unruly chestnut hair into crazy patterns that cover my face. I’m peeking through the hair mask when Daddy charges into the central thoroughfare bedroom and kills the volume. The sudden disruption makes my stomach hurt.

There are no names
For the bards I met tonight,
Though I feigned interest
As a flattered lady might.

I met “Lauren” on Match.com. Or rather, she found me. That was the first red flag. Women are never attracted to me on Match.com, unless they are from Russia or the Philippines and seeking a green card marriage.

like fervent notations
on a legal pad
a memory lives like sharp red ink
in the margins
of my life