Then we would walk through the brown thrushes to the mansion next door, its windows gaping, bits of chandelier littering the weeds. As the dead waltzed in the rusted gazebo, we kissed, our feet thick with clay. Whores in orange shimmery dresses, pink-sequined transvestites and the hellfire prophets. We would meet among the broken factories. Crazy in love, I passed you like any other stranger on the street, then flew south over New York City, not knowing you would come a thousand miles for me.
Love is hard as snow.
My mother slept all one summer to have me, and you were born dead, your face blue. In a basement of one light, you fought your drunken father, fielding his Marine's punches without crying, and my mother held me back in the darkness, saving my life for you. We wrapped our pain in bandages and trudged toward each other, under a sky of bombs. We could have lived on different stars, light years apart. I could have loved a monk on the Irish Sea or a caveman in France, and you might have lain abed with Catherine the Great, her body like summer in Russia.