The House on Mango Street

I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza

wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be.

I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be.

Gwendolyn Brooks' Maud Martha, Nellie Campobello's Cartucho, Ermilo Abreu Gomez's Canek, and Tomás Rivera's Y no se lo tragó la tierra.

Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class or in any of my classes, in all the years of my education, had ever discussed a house like mine.

A story is like a Giacometti sculpture. The farther away it is from you, the clearer you can see it

Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love, and no one could call that crazy.

They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out.

A House of My Own

Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.

Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.