The
sisters laugh together in the alley,
loose in their spotless aprons. The radio
is trilling inside their empty Russian deli,
a small sound even through the open door.
The sisters pass around a photograph
of a man in a yellow shirt and a pompadour
and laugh until the little space seems full
of rushing birds. Curious in his kitchen,
the baker next door comes out to the alley, pulls
a cigarette from his pocket, lights it, watches
the sisters laugh. He’s never said a
word
to any of them, but now the youngest catches
his attention, and looking at her, he thinks of cherries
and liquid sugar. Suddenly, he wants
to kiss her long thin arms and tell her stories
about his town in Brazil, about his mother.
He wants to take their apron
strings—his
and hers and her sisters’—and tie them all
together:
four people knotted in an alleyway,
cleaving together, contact cutting through
the words, which are really useless anyway
when all one wants to say is, “Here we are,”
when all one wants to do is smell the salt
as it dries on other skin in the summer air.
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