By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
This scan-verified 'The Best' page speaks in a woman's voice about body sadness, a vacent stomach, male attention, blindness, sweet tooth, Ronald Regan jelly beans, and the small town street remembering childhood.
The added BLIND line changes the turn into the jelly-bean memory. The page feels playful at the surface, but its body-consciousness and small-town memory keep pulling it toward shame and self-recognition.
'The Best' speaks in a woman's voice that braids body sadness with small-town defiance. She learns 'what it was like / to pick up my breasts from underneath / and feel sad,' yet takes her 'vacent stomach / to the store' and still smiles at a man who 'thinks he sees me / Eight inches from my nose,' wishing him no harm 'For I bend also.' A handwritten 'BLIND' precedes the sweet-tooth turn into 'Ronald Regan jelly beans' kept in 'my family's three hundred / year old river green canister.' It closes by questioning memory: 'You think the small town street / remembers my childhood.' Source spellings ('vacent,' 'Regan') are kept.