A Writer Writes: Beautiful Stranger — a poem by Mark Brazaitis (Guatemala)
• “I’ve seen them from bus windows in Chimaltenango, stepping out at dusk before the men come. They aren’t pretty. Have you noticed how their waists always look like they’re supporting gun belts and their eyes always seem to be in shadow, as if curtains had been pulled over them? “Changing busses once in El Rancho, I was walking across town, if you want to call it a town — it’s all dust and cashew stands — and out of the back door of some building stepped this woman, no, only a girl. She was as tall as I was and she didn’t have the gun-belt waist and she didn’t have the shadowed eyes, although I could tell she was going to get them one day, one day soon. She smiled at me, a smile I bet she’d worn a thousand times already, and she motioned to me like someone . . .
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Exquisite, Mark! Leita