The sky in its ultramarine hour frames the tremendous, impossible
moment when the stores close. The seamstresses turn to other seams.
It hurts, that smell of workers who designed embroidered flowers
to dress flawless and flawed bodies. Impossible,
the light of that preterit world in tulle and cotton.
A room stuffed with the promise of dances.
My nieces, with no father
to see them leave the house like that, ravishing, orphan.
Sun outside the store, powerless to penetrate
that room. That hulking absence,
and living with it. Canvas and paper. What I write today along
the border of the unsaid.