Unit 2: Selection Vocabulary 4

She doesn’t seem impressed.

Fuzzy dark hair on skin shiny as lacquer.

On one side
of the bright, noisy room,
light skin.
Other side,
dark skin.

Both laughing, chewing,
as if it never occurred
to them
someone medium
would show up.

...how to eat
the pink sausage
snuggled inside bread
shaped like a corncob,
smeared with sauces
yellow and red.

Follow this
to its natural conclusion—dead end

Cross over
the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

dumped on the mangrove swamp—buried
terrain of the past.

Bring only

what you must carry—tome of memory,
its random blank pages.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both

...long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence

The laundromat downstairs had been boarded up because it had been robbed two days before and the owner had painted on the wood YES WE'RE OPEN so as not to lose business.

Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier.

I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees.

They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger.