Janine Oshiro Narrative It would be causal, it would be casual— it would happen at a fair. People bustle. Outside it is afternoon, inside it is night. Night brings a shudder over my body. (This is nothing against those who should have looked out for me.) I am stolen and kept in a room whose walls are white paper doors. Do I have to spell out how I was seized? A small girl watching the dancing man with the same name as her brother. Paper walls. Could I have leaned up against them, broken through? How I was seized— sitting in the middle of the room and not moving. I remembered the dancing man, how his face glowed an orange-red lantern. Skin is fixative to light, and powder— how does it compensate? I love him— the dancing woman. If the doors could not contain the shadows of the fair, would I lay myself down to be taken? Rustle of small steps. And he is a woman in how his hands move like white blossoms. I take the branch and shake it. It is said, like rain. But it is the rough bark of her lips, the gold shimmer of the pin he pulls from his hair that make me. In a white room it would happen like this. It would take me ______ years to say it. Of The Desire to Say The sound you made, it was a what- aphant. What difference! Putting it together the bed was bigger than it had been and a laugh had left me still intact with that old trap I keep as my mouth. But what difference, a whataphant a- waking. In the room (a smoking room) everyone was sleeping, but me and the little girl who appeared beside the bed. She came to find and found what in the room I refused to see. But the bed was bigger than it had been, and the something sitting on the chest of me would not let go. Let me go. But she would not let up her stare. I was afraid. You were in the next bed over—had said a whataphant awaking the same feeling—the desire to say love, cheekbones, to say reddish- brown. I want to be two girls in a wind tunnel with you. I want to hold you in a small space inside me. I raised my arm (the only part of me that could) and dropped it to the bed, the hinge of me releasing my body to bolt. I do not care to comment on the violence in language. I want to make a thing and hold it as if it were unbroken. Girl I would be as cradle. I would be a catfish. I am no longer that girl but there is one who visits me. Temporary, but not unkind, she will take you with her. There is no such thing as need fulfilled. In the ground that girl is a flower. In your hands, the future is surprising. Bright bird! Silly angel! That girl, I would not know without her dress, I would not know without my body's frightened fence when I see her. To say nothing of night. It is not sleep that brings me to her: clasped breath, pin bent vision. Tomorrow will be only a new day. You would be without her unable to take me. Or, Take me. We could never be two. Unornamented and flustered, I say nothing is like this. I am mounting the words until you cry, Cleveland! Ohio! It is a place like any other. about Janine Oshiro