I wanted to kiss her, I wanted her to leave her stertorous husband, deflower me, and cultivate me in the garden of my youth.

I stared at him with watery eyes, pleading for compassion, while he berated my sloppy prosody

The crushing sadness of hotel rooms; the gelid lights and clean notepads; the blank walls and particles of someone else’s erased life: I rolled him into this as if into hell.

Szmura would sometimes bring home a woman—he had an unmistakable taste for the meretricious kind