Potrait by Carolyn

It's been a very difficult season. I'd like to remember the best pieces- the portraits done with love in smokey dive bars, the cold walks to the hospital in the dead of winter (we were lit up with superhuman warmth because we were needed and we needed each other, sharing cigarettes on the way, late night calls- he is going to live, tell me so) and the art left in mailboxes because crushes are young and so are we, although we've seen so much pain. I'd like to remember killer kisses and not the life I saw people wasting and losing against their will- shared needles in dirty sinks, dry skin from over-washing, insides now out in hospital bins and bags, we have no secrets in the end of days.

When the first sprouts of fern appear in edible coils in the woods this spring I will be there, a hundred years older, new. Persephone knocks on her mother's door. The sound is a gasp for breath that never leaves the earth, ever. It keeps cycling.