Photograph by: Christopher Prosser and Shaun Schroth / Words by: Genevieve Palmieri
Across the Margin, in coordination with Washington D.C. photographers Christopher Prosser and Shaun Schroth, continues its interpretations of the seasons through both snapshots and words……
There’s a silver halite wash over the city-
I’m sure I’ve seen this movie before.
Light present for only a moment-
Hazy.
Distant.
The memory of an old lover’s touch.
Frosty hands reaching in
To steal the warmth from inside.
Each gasp a steady escape of the spirit-
Eviscerating.
Captured in dead air.
The street swells and sweats; surrendering its own
sweet hot breath to the naked sky.
A sacrifice to the heavens denied;
The gift disappears unaccepted.
Unforgiving.
Unfeeling.
I need something to warm me.
Cashmere kisses my skin but I’m dying
for some heat.
Sun, sweat, sex—
fuck, I’ll take anything.
I’m tempted to grab a stranger
and hunker down for a week;
wrapped up in sheets and bourbon.
Surfacing only for momentary fixes of rations and reality.
I long for the weight of humid entanglement, to gasp from the ecstasy of it.
I miss you.
I need something to warm me.
The light has long since left me; it was never going to work.
It could never warm me being so distant.
Instead, I watch it fade
into the horizon with no pomp or circumstance
“It’s too bad”, I think. We could have exploded
if you had just given me a little heat.
I feel more at peace enveloped in the cloak of the evening.
Somehow in the darkness, everything is a little clearer.
Sharper.
Illuminated in its absence.
I am wide-awake.
I am frozen.
I need a drink.
A respite from the bitterness….
A tiny public house glows in the distance.
I step hurriedly to its candle-lit windows
and roll my eyes at the cliched behavior:
quite literally a moth to a flame.
The sweet musk of a cask-coddled elixir.
This is a start.
I need something to warm me.
Anxious and thirsty.
A little game of ping pong with a tea light.
The flame dances, clinging to life.
Its tiny tongue along the shadows cast on my face.
A valiant effort but still
a fight in vain
against an overwhelmingly gelid night —
It’s going to take more
than that to undo the damage that’s been done.
By some miracle or magic,
You are there.
You’re always there.
Did I conjure you?
My body immediately thaws at your touch – and we begin.
Wordplay.
Foreplay.
It’s all the same.
My single-malt in its twenties, and my sparring partner in his thirties.
The chill banished. Eternal Summer.
We radiate.
