It fell to me to put the ashes in her hair. I brushed out the long silky folds which had been always been tied tightly back. Her pendent of Maria was at her throat, like always. I gathered the few rings and bracelets we owned and put them on hands that were still for the first time in my memory. She was always baking, busy with the cook stones and the herbs, sweeping the dirt floor, changing the thatching in the roof.

"Just stand politely," mom told me. In a few days I would begin kindergarten. "It's all right to stand." I was excited. Starting school would be fun. "But don't put your hand over your heart." The playground would be filled with my new friends. The playground's centerpiece was a stack of giant monster truck tires; three on the ground, adjoining each other in a circle, and another of equal size stacked on the center. Kids clenched the large tire treads and pulled themselves upward to become king of the mountain.

We are in the kitchen, you holding the long knife
by its black handle, brooding over where to begin cutting,
which part of the thick red flesh to sink into first.
You turn the watermelon over in your hands,
consider with care the two-tone hull, dark waxy skin
and its lighter stripes, like white electric fingers
had brushed it end to end, fading the green...

I.

My mother turned
her back to me
while she changed
her shirt for bed.
I peeked from
her doorway, watched
in eight-year-old wonder
her long, milky back
with cluters of freckles,
dotting her skin like
undiscovered stars...

The nuns were supposed to pick the purest girl in the school, but they didn't want any trouble, so they decided to pick a name out of a hat. It happened the Thursday before the May Crowning, and all eighty-eight of us St. John students were dragged out into the one gray hallway our school had and forced to stand at attention like the nice little Catholic robots they were training us to be.
"Turner, look over there, next to the fountain," Steve said.