Scenes from “The Passion”: The Evening

There is an alley where you can go, where you can kiss someone’s mouth until you climb inside them, force your way in, push your cells into their cells and become one creature — angelic. It isn’t the way you’d dream it. There is piss, dew-damp moss crawling across the brick. Some nights it is so dark you must enter only by touch. Walk by in the light and it will seem like nothing. The scripture is written by wenches: 4eva, L+ J, I.T.A.L.Y. A heart jagged in two. But what you’ll make there it’s not love, it’s not weighed down with that, it’s feather, air, an at-once exultation of being not of this time, this alley, this shitty good for no one, shut-down town. I never went there, I promise you. I never knew such sweet violence. Though there are mornings now, miles from that place, when I wake with the thought of it: wet and bitten, half- winged.