August 2001

It was sticky hot.

The kind of mugginess that stays in your brain--etched in as the last time that the heat wafting between skyscrapers was the greatest of problems.

Sticky hot--but still--days were left to be had in the second round of this Freedom From Fear

---interrupted just shy of 60.

Sweat dripping down the cusp of her backbone; the cup slipping through her fingers; the inevitable consequence of condensation.

And that was yesterday---

The contemporary pneumonoultramicroscopicsiliconvolcanoconiosis; lingering of the black lung; the Lower Manhattan plague.

As it were--the magnificent miscarriage of vanishing twins---

It was all so sticky hot

---1987 now my elusive concubine.