Ang

          You never had any talent for dancing. No talent really for any of this. Doesn’t everyone presuppose that a hooker can never lose her job?

          You didn’t become your mother then. She could keep you alive. But she worked so hard to purge herself of invisibility that she forgot to make sure she hadn’t passed it on to her daughter.

          Her body would wave from the pole like a banner. It seemed she could rally them from the ends of the earth.

          “Keep love in your heart.”

          “Love is a work of the imagination, Mother, as you very well know.”

Angel

She used to say her men smelled like water. They wore colognes with names like Ocean Blue and Pure Ice. “They’re lonely,” she would say. This one lost his mother recently. That one’s wife doesn’t give him what he needs.

Mother, where did you find these genteel men? All of my men smell like piss. I cannot help but wonder. If a mother is missing, if a wife is not enough, what are their visits to us but motes of dust with which they try to fill their emptiness? Mother, won’t you get out of bed and answer these questions.

Angelic

When we would walk past them, the girls would taunt at me. “When will you join us, sweet little lady? Don’t you think our resolve was just as strong? How much longer will you be able to say you are too young? We know you don’t believe us, but the city is beautiful by night and the work is not so difficult as you think. You too will seek the streets, when your babies are crying with empty bellies. You will leave them alone to hunt with us then, and you will creep back to them at dawn with bread.”

Angelica

“Keep love in your heart,” my mother used to say, “And it will always be returned.” She loved her audience, but they forgot her with the next exquisite performer. And she loved her men, but they only knew how to devour. And she loved me, but I grew increasingly to despise her. I could see she no longer did it for the money but out of desperation. She did it just to know that she could be felt. Just to know that she could be seen and had not yet dissolved into the sweat and smoke of the ugly air.