Sipping Your Coffee While Reading the Miami Herald 

You walk through the pages of your deaths. You are Harry Thomas, accident victim-a father, 
a banker--you are trapped, dragged behind an SUV on I-95, just a trunk of partially-clothed flesh 
scraping off onto rough gray pavement as your blood drips onto the national news section. 
You are Officer Raul Dominguez, and your wife and kids are asleep at home. Your dark, brown-curled 
head stops the bullet intended for Mario Prospero's girlfriend. You try to shake it off but you fall to the floor 
and your blood spreads across a dirt-crusted dry-grass doormat in Little Havana onto page one of the Herald. 
You are Emilie Gouteau, no one knows for sure your thin fourteen-year-old dark body is here from Haiti. 
As your mother paces the floors of her apartment back in Port au Prince, you stumble into the lobby of Jackson 
Memorial Hospital gripping your appendix; it's too late--broke, you waited too long to seek help. 
In the emergency room they stare as you slide down onto page three of the local section where you 
become an unidentified black female. In your Miami Beach condo, you drift off into the blue-green ocean 
that matches your eyes, you, Mrs. Myrtle Winterbottom, whose dry white fingers once 
created soft, springy mountains of knitted mittens and hats for ten giggling grandchildren back in New York. 
Yes, you die in your sleep years after you found your way out of Ravensbrück concentration camp only to 
wander into a two-inch obituary.