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Heart Warming, by Cindy Kennedy
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Juan Pablo Mobili
 
By the time I was old enough to notice
anything beyond whether my parents loved me,
 
the library ruled the longest wall
of our small apartment.
 
My father had drawn it originally on a napkin,
rows of shelves of different heights and the huge door
framing the oil painting he finished the year
before my brother was born, from a still frame
from the movie Hiroshima Mon Amour.
 
On the canvas the man’s hand
cupped the woman’s face.
 
He looked at her but she looked away.
Her grief glowed.
 
Long before he ever thought appropriate to tell me
of the tragedies of Hiroshima and being in love,
the man and the woman on the painting
became part of my life.
 
It took years to realize that the day they dropped the bomb
the world defrauded itself, that couple, and my father,
whose silence grew larger than an atomic cloud.
 
Every time we moved from one small apartment to another
the couple came with us. 
 
Now I regret I lost track of what happened to the painting
after my parents died, so much still to learn
about all four of them.
 
When I walk into a small room even today,
I wonder if she still looks away the way she used to
and cup my hand.​
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