first babysitting job, brown-eyed
bambina, couldn’t calm her
when she woke and found a
stranger taking care – hush
and observe, her curly hair, her
woe, the soft rough texture
of the eczematous skin inside
her elbows, many creams and
medicines, a phone number that
didn’t work, an anxious 12-year-old

princess in a castle near
the high school, where we
gathered to puzzle over physics
problems – soon bored with
studying, we asked to see her
closet, she graciously obliged;
it’d be flouting natural law for
this group to sustain more interest
in mathematical equations than
those turtlenecks in rainbow colors

except for lots of curly
hair and glasses, I don’t
recall the details of his
face – the shape of nose
or mouth, a mouth upon
which once I forced a kiss –
I remember friendship, talks
of film school, but especially
his last name, a Deutsche
concoction “from the middle village”