number 36

food & thought
There was eight of us or so huddled round a tiny table in a small corner of a dark bar and the bad music, which was live, which was happening right there in front of us where women with hairy pits danced some kind of yoga, feeling free, I hope, and around that table we took turns telling stories about the young married couple among us -- the ones moving away this week and us here telling goodbye and until-next-time stories, wondering, all of us at some point I think, if we would ever see them again this side of death and we'd had dinner at the church, a little bread and a little wine, and now we were sipping a little more wine, a bit of beer, dark there in the shadows, and God that boy got up and danced with those women and he rolled on the floor with them and all very slowly and never cracking a smile and Lord I still ache for how I laughed those huge rolling tears hot out of my eyeballs.

Going
We break, bleed a little in
the space of their last leaving
as they walk away from us.