I am Henryetta. I store everything in my girlhood room. I tape my sisters laughing and I keep the tapes in the trunk of my car
which is smooth as a pill. And there are the tape spools. Half melted, all various, like a hundred black hands.
I follow Sam he’s my love. I’ve been following him for years. I say, don’t you know
your Henryetta? I met him in a patch of peach trees. We ground the blossoms to dust. Then we smelled great. Like the best dust. I’ll tell you what I love about Sam. It’s his ankles. I cup them. His pulse is feeble as a moth’s. I follow, follow. I wring his shirts like I would wring my hands. He is a man. Even the sunblacked turtles would come out with illiads and odysseys if they knew Sam. Truthly a man, a whole man. With scooped-white shoulders and an acre of body like a moon. His voice is ten pitches higher on tape but every sentence is a whole song of several paragraphs. Sam is all groomed. His hair is like a cobweb in a shaft of light
and where he is it’s always morning
and Henryetta follows him down the spine of the earth.