“He ain’t no doll. I keep on telling you GI Joe ain't no doll. I don’t play with dolls. That'd make me some kind of sissy, like you, always talking about kissing and reading and stuff.”
I look around at the solid glass wall, cathedral ceiling, Oriental rugs, squishy soft sofas, and wonder whether Enedina, who lives in this house eight hours a day, is under the impression that me and George live in similar surroundings. If she were to know what kind of place we really live in, would she ever consent to letting us have her baby?
She went back to the bedroom where the man was still in the bed. She told him she was ready to go now, and then she folded him up neatly and put him into the bag too.
Had she no memory of machetes and warlords, of petty thieves with missing arms, Rhoda would not have understood the meaning of the question, “Short sleeves or long sleeves?”
Gloria Mindock, author of the poetry collections, Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson St. Press, 2007) and Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa, 2010), is editor and publisher of Cervena Barva Press, and in 2007, became the editor of the Istanbul Literary Review, an online journal based in Turkey.
The adrenaline and exhilaration of declaring freedom from a situation perceived as oppressive was soon replaced by increasing panic when I realized I would no longer be getting a paycheck.
Sloth. Mark Goldblatt. Greenpoint Press, 2010. $16.00. 173 pp.