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A Question
The woman in the building across from me hauls onto the fire escape a yucca plant and squeezes it between a crate of herbs and a sapling fern tree. She looks a lot like me from twenty feet away. A forelock lies sweaty against her cheek as if she’s forgotten to fix herself. I put my thumbs and forefingers to my eye and frame her. I am reminded of those Chinese boxes made of red paper, inside one is another holding another, until at the center sits the tiniest mockery and celebration of the cell itself. She looks haggard but happy here, five flights up, bending over a fat leaf as if admiring herself in the waxy surface. Then she opens up the jewel-case of her voice, and I remember how once my sister asked my mother which one of us sang better. My mother paused from sewing as if adding seventeen to seventy-five and said we sounded the same. Good or bad, who knows. Each of us now watches the empty, open mouth of the other.