Lust Series
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The first time love felt like coming back to life it was spring after a hard blizzard. Love had been maimed, rocking herself in a closet to somehow bring back the girl who was. Halved raw, wet feathers again lopped in brine and currant jelly, a second birth, as if waiting for teeth to break from her gums, as if sounds not yet become words or thought scoured from a bramble of sentences. From all fours love climbed back to two feet. Enrolled at a prairie college stretching to the Dakotas Wounded Knee Blue Lake New Ulm Redwood Falls. The brick had barely lifted its lips from the teats, new among ramshackle farmhouses that stood down long breathing lanes. Here the ruddy skin of red stoned dormitories, science buildings domed with smoke plexiglass like flying saucers piloted by androids, a freakish examining by moonlight of the snow with its throat cut. Nothing in those bodies and buildings could teach love how to live. Like farm boys around girls who shuffled their feet, although they’d helped birth piglets and seen afterbirth flower from the humid womb of sows. Sky mounted the plains, an ink-blue wilderness of barbed wire trying to pluck its thorns from the wind. Eighteen, her arm in a sling, metal fused to bone, none of it mattering to love who was coming back into this girl. She glowed with a beautiful wounded sheen. Hair straight to her waist, frail in a blue cape, a brokenness trying to pretend that love was is could yet be again.