Secret Alliance

These five old women, with their skinny dog, who ate all

the supplies in the basement storage vessels along with

the rats, these black women with the black shawls in

the night, who goes to the other house with the small oil lamp

         by the stairway,

met, in the street, the limping man, the deaf, the maimed man

and talked to him with ugly gestures, looking at the shadows

of their hands depicted on the opposite wall. The other lurked

behind the door. The dog sniffed him and wagged its tail.

The deaf man noticed the dog’s treason and laughed.

The old women vanished in thin air.

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