All day long the world enters my brain,

my brain enters the world. There is even

a noise, click, but the noise is invented,

the screen lights up with something not

in the room, as now a memory drowns out

the clank of weights at the gym when

I spot the friend of a boyfriend I had oh,

decades ago and click, I’m washed

in the shame of the night I was dumped

(that party, shifty glances, another peasant-

skirted woman, yadda yadda): it burns!

I blush! Then the word libélula enters

the room, click, detached from its meaning,

beautiful on the tongue: libé—beating heart—

lula—plume of spray on a geyser—and

a dragonfly lands on a water lily. Next come

the shoes of movie stars, exhaling inside

their cedar boxes, then my grandfather

in a wine-colored chair, smoking a Sunday

cigar. I took his cigar box to school

for my pencils, and on another bad day

lifted the lid, inhaled the lingering scent

and was gone from the miserable room. Click,

barbells thud as I drop them into place,

my arms swim back to me, breath

enters and exits my own two lungs,

pulmones: pull, and pull, and rest.

Mary Hawley is a poet, fiction writer, and literary translator (Spanish to English). Her poems, short stories, and translations of poetry and prose have appeared in TriQuarterly, The Common, Hypertext, Notre Dame Review, and other publications. She is the author of a poetry collection, Double Tongues (Tía Chucha Press) and has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award in fiction.