she has a way of making small things feel significant:
the way she taped her moving boxes together,
double stripped: she doesn't know if the first one
will hold; her white lighter superstition; the way her
skin was quick to bruise, even when you were gentle;
her broken teeth, the lost fillings you ran your tongue
over like your tires on her pockmarked street the first
and last times (and all the times in between) that you
drove to that bad side of town, where shoes swung
from power lines and women wept over the sticky red
bodies of sons and husbands and fathers but only spoke
in hushed, shamed spanish about their own blood loss.
in the end, there's nothing too significant about it: she has
trust issues that extend to duct tape and lighters; she bruises
like a peach; she has bad teeth because she was too poor to fix
them; her love dried up like the brazos in the texas summer.