Summary:

Two voices are heard in this short poem: an English-speaking interviewer and a Spanish-speaking respondent. The interviewer’s lines consist of a battery of single-word questions corresponding to common categories on an intake form ("address/occupation/age/marital status . . . "). The respondent attempts to humanize the interchange by providing significant personal and cultural information. He interjects politely, "perdone . . . ," introducing first himself, "yo me llamo pedro," and then naming his father, "el senor ortega / (a veces don jose)." The interviewer is never swayed from the bureaucratic list of one-word questions.

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Summary:

There are many crossings in this bittersweet short story about Cleofilas. First, as a young woman, she leaves her dusty little town in Mexico with a new husband she hardly knows to cross north to Texas, "en el otro lado--on the other side." Filled with images of fictional passions from telenovas--soap operas--Cleofilas can hardly admit it to herself, let alone to anyone else, when her dreams of romance and domestic happiness sour in the face of poverty, alcoholism, and abuse. She remains trapped by shame, disbelief, and the limitations of women's traditional roles in a hovel on the banks of La Gritona--Woman Hollering Creek.

Finally, a health care worker notices Cleofilas's bruises during a prenatal visit and offers to help her escape. The clinician arranges for her friend to drive Cleofilas to the bus home to Mexico. Crossing the bridge over the Woman Hollering Creek, which has swollen with Spring rains, Cleofilas is introduced to and amazed by new, stronger and more positive possibilities for womanhood.

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Summary:

An American surgeon (Cary Grant) and his wife (Paula Raymond) are detained against their will in a fictional South American country to save the life of the country's dictator (Jose Ferrer). Compelled by a sense of duty, the physician performs a successful surgery despite his abhorrence of the dictator and his government.

Before the surgery, the physician negotiates safe passage out of the country for his wife. However unbeknownst to him before the surgery, she is kidnapped by revolutionaries. They convey word to the doctor that their ransom demands that he cause the dictator's death. This demand betrays the physician's previously felt allegiance with the revolutionaries whom he believed to have been acting from ideals of liberty and justice.

The dictator does die, although not at the hand of the physician. Ironically he dies because he does not follow the physician's advice. Believing that the physician complied with their demands to kill the dictator, the revolutionaries allow the couple to return to the United States.

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Summary:

This five-line poem poses a direct question of distributive justice to a mother faced with scarce resources. "Indian Poem" asks the mother to decide how she will divide what little she has among her children. She must choose between her strong son who has no immediate need, her weak son who is bound to die soon , and her daughter, "who is a girl anyway." The poem presents an imperative choice, but acknowledges that in choosing, the mother will also suffer along with her children.

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Summary:

This story takes us to the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky where the traditions of family, farming, and freedom blend in a durable wholeness and wholesomeness of place. It is to this place that Burley Coulter is returned by his kin to die. In what turned out to be a mistaken expression of compassion, Burley's family took him to the doctor when, after eighty-two years, he fell ill. But then seeing him lying in the "mechanical room" of a hospital, attached to a life support system, his family conspires quietly and heroically to kidnap him so that he can die in his beloved woods.

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