I was thirty, she was twenty-six,
lying in bed, I had bronchitis,
and it was love how she
held my chest when I coughed
and felt my ribs shake,
how every hour, she’d wet
the washcloth and bring me
a cup of orange cough syrup
I’d down in one gulp and then lie back,
staring at the place where the ceiling
was beginning to buckle down.
She would rattle on in her Northern voice,
which was so new to me,
and while she talked,
she’d paint rocks with pictures
of horses or starry lakes
ready to swallow the moon,
and sometimes she’d just paint
the rocks a base color,
and wait for the inspiration to come.
Or she would run her hand
down each of my vertebrae,
and even though spines are ugly,
she made them look lovely,
the way she paused between sections
with her small hand pressed into a fist.
We were three years past when my parents met,
and I didn’t know what to say,
or what my father told my mother
to make her fall in love with him.
“Soon, the rain will come and if the roof is not fixed, a flood will come,”
She said and must have seen me staring into the distance
because she gave me a kiss on my forehead so none of it mattered.
It was only a little apartment, just before winter,
in her flat feet and blue eyes and pale arms.
We broke up a week later, and she was my one true love.
The 22nd Row 