It isn’t the most beautiful town on the coast, but I adore it: the crumbling friary said to be haunted by the Black Nun, the stone house on a short cliff.
The only lock of hair I have ever mourned is a silky strand—a baby’s purest blond, saved from the first cut of a daughter’s hair & preserved with a photo under glass.
The soldier wears a helmet shaped like a tortoise shell. He processes my papers. Tells me the reception hall is used for karate. On stage, I pick sagebrush off
Let’s begin with the paintings, Marc Chagall’s Rain, a surreal portrait of a farm in a Russian village— with strange dreamlike childlike forms of humans & animals—
Under the oppressive July heat, I carry my aching body, sweat-coated and glistening, up the staircase spiraling and spiraling skyward until I arrive. Within, a sightless darkness—
