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I see the moon
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the moon sees me
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the moon sees somebody
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that I don't see
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God bless the moon
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and God bless me
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and God bless the somebody
that I don't see
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If I get to heaven
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before you do
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I'll make a hole
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and pull you through
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and I'll write your name
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on every star
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and that way the world
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won't seem so far
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The astronaut will not be at work today.
He has called in sick.
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He has turned off his cell phone,
his laptop, his pager, his alarm clock.
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There is a fat yellow cat asleep on his couch,
raindrops against the window
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and not even the hint coffee
in the kitchen air.
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Everybody is in a tizzy.
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The engineers on the fifteenth floor have
stopped working on their particle machine.
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The anti-gravity room is leaking,
and even the freckled kid with glasses,
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whose only job it is to take out the trash
is nervous, fumbles the bag,
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spills the banana peel and a paper cup.
Nobody notices.
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They are too busy re-calculating
what this will mean for lost time.
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How many galaxies
are we losing per second?
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How long before the next rocket
can be launched?
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Somewhere an electron
flies off its energy cloud.
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A black hole has erupted.
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A mother finishes setting
the table for dinner.
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A "Law and Order" marathon is starting.
The astronaut is asleep.
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He has forgotten to turn off his watch
which ticks like a metal pulse
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against his wrist.
He does not hear it.
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He dreams of coral reefs and plankton.
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His fingers find the pillow cases,
sailing masts.
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He turns on his side, opens his eyes once.
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He thinks that scuba divers must have
the most wonderful job in the world,
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so much water to glide through.
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Thank you.
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When I was little,
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I could not understand the concept
that you could only live one life.
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And I don't mean this metaphorically --
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I mean I literally thought
that I was going to get to do
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everything there was to do
and be everything there was to be.
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It was only a matter of time.
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And there was no limitation
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based on age or gender or race
or even appropriate time period.
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I was sure that I was
actually going to experience
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what it felt like to be a leader
of the civil rights movement,
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or a ten-year-old boy living on a farm
during the dust bowl.
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or an emperor
of the Tang dynasty in China.
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My mom says that when people asked me
what I wanted to be when I grew up,
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my typical response was
princess, ballerina, astronaut,
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and what she doesn't understand is that
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I wasn't trying to invent
some combined super-profession.
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I was listing things I thought
I was going to get to be,
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a princess and a ballerina
and an astronaut.
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And I'm pretty sure the list
probably went on from there --
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I usually just got cut off.
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It was never a question of if
I was going to get to do something,
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so much as a question of when.
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And I was sure
that if I was going to do everything
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that it probably meant
that I had to move pretty quickly
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because there was a lot of stuff
I needed to do.
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So my life was constantly
in a state of rushing.
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I was always scared
that I was falling behind,
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and since I grew up in New York City,
as far as I could tell,
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rushing was pretty normal.
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But as I grew up,
I had this sinking realization
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that I wasn't going to get to live
any more than one life.
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I only knew what it felt like
to be a teenaged girl in New York City,
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not a teenage boy in New Zealand,
not a prom queen in Kansas.
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I only got to see through my lens,
and it was around this time
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I became obsessed with stories
because it was through stories
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that I was able to see
through someone else's lens,
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however briefly or imperfectly.
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And I started craving
hearing other people's experiences
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because I was so jealous
that there were entire lives
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that I was never going to get to live
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and I wanted to hear about everything
that I was missing.
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And by the transitive property,
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I realized that some people were never
going to get to experience
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what it felt like to be a teenage girl
in New York City --
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which meant that
they weren't going to know
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what the subway ride
after your first kiss feels like
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or how quiet it gets when it snows,
and I wanted them to know.
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I wanted to tell them,
and this became the focus of my obsession.
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I busied myself telling stories
and sharing stories and collecting them
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and it's not until recently that I realized
that I can't always rush poetry.
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In April, the National Poetry Month,
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there's this challenge that many poets
in the poetry community participate in.
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And it's called the 30/30 challenge.
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And the idea is, you write a new poem
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every single day
for the entire month of April
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and last year,
I tried it for the first time
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and was thrilled by the efficiency
at which I was able to produce poetry.
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But at the end of the month,
I looked back at these 30 poems
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that I had written and discovered that
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they were all trying to tell
the same story,
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it had just taken me 30 tries to figure out
the way that it wanted to be told.
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And I realized that
this is probably true of other stories
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on an even larger scale.
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I have stories
that I have tried to tell for years,
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re-writing and re-writing,
constantly searching for the right words.
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There's a French poet and essayist
by the name of Paul Valéry who said that
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a poem is never finished,
it is only abandoned,
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and this terrifies me because it implies
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that I could keep re-editing
and re-writing forever
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and it's up to me to decide
when a poem's finished
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and when I can walk away from it.
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And this goes directly against
my very obsessive nature
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to try to find the right answer
and the perfect words and the right form.
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And I use poetry in my life
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as a way to help me navigate
and work through things
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but just because I end a poem
doesn't mean that I've solved
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what it was I was puzzling through.
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I like to re-visit old poetry
because it shows me exactly
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where I was at that moment.
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What it was I was trying to navigate
and the words that I chose to help me.
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Now I have a story
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that I've been stumbling over
for years and years,
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and I'm not sure if I've found
the perfect form,
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or whether this is just one attempt,
and I will try to re-write it later
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in search of a better way to tell it.
But I do know that later when I look back,
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I will be able to know that
this is where I was at this moment.
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And this is what I was trying to navigate,
these words, here in this room, with you.
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So, smile
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It didn't always work this way.
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There was a time
when you had to get your hands dirty.
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When you were in the dark for most of it,
fumbling was a given..
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If you needed more contrast,
more saturation,
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darker darks and brighter brights,
they called it extended development.
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Meant you spent longer inhaling chemicals.
Longer up to your wrists.
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It wasn't always easy.
Grandpa Stuart was a navy photographer.
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Young, red-faced with sleeves rolled up,
fists of fingers like fat rolls of coins,
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he looked like
Popeye the Sailor Man, come to life.
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Crooked smile, tuft of chest hair,
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he showed up to World War II
with a smirk and a hobby.
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When they asked him
if he knew much about photography,
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he lied, learned to read Europe like a map
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upside down,
from the height of a fighter plane,
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camera snapping, eyelids flapping,
the darkest darks and brightest brights,
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he learned war
like he could read his way home.
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When other men returned,
they put their weapons out to rust,
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but he brought the lenses
and the cameras home with him,
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opened a shop,
turned it into a family affair.
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My father was born into this world,
a black and white.
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His basketball hands
learned the tiny clicks and slides
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of lens into frame, film into camera,
chemical into plastic bin,
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his father knew the equipment
but not the art.
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He knew the darks but not the brights.
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My father learned the magic,
spent his time following light.
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Once he traveled across the country
to follow a forest fire,
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hunted with his camera for a week.
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Follow the light, he said.
Follow the light.
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There are parts of me
I only recognize from photographs:
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the loft on Wooster Street
with the creaky hallways,
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the 12-foot ceilings,
white walls and cold floors.
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This was my mother's home
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before she was mother,
before she was wife, she was artist.
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And the only two rooms in the house
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with the walls that reached
all the way up to the ceiling
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and doors that opened and closed
were the bathroom and the darkroom.
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The darkroom she built herself
with custom-made stainless steel sinks,
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an 8x10 bed enlarger that moved
up and down by a giant hand crank.
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A bank of color balanced lights,
a white glass wall for viewing prints,
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a drying rack
that moved in and out from the wall.
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My mother built herself a dark room.
Made it her home.
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Fell in love with a man
with basketball hands,
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with the way he looked at light.
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They got married, had a baby,
moved to a house near a park
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but they kept the loft on Wooster Street
for birthday parties and treasure hunts.
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The baby tipped the gray scale,
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filled her parents' photo albums
with red balloons and yellow icing.
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The baby grew into a girl without freckles,
with a crooked smile,
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who didn't understand why her friends
did not have dark rooms in their houses,
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who never saw her parents kiss.
Who never saw them hold hands.
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But one day another baby showed up,
this one with perfect, straight hair
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and bubble gum cheeks,
they named him Sweet Potato
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and when he laughed,
he laughed so loudly,
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he scared the pigeons on the fire escape.
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And the four of them lived
in that house near the park:
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the girl with no freckles,
the Sweet Potato boy,
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the basketball father and darkroom mother.
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And they lit their candles and said their prayers and the corners of the photographs curled. One day, some towers fell and the house near the park became a house under
Retired user
01:31 "the" is missing ("the next rocket")
Retired user
06:32 "perfect", not "prefect"