Our marriage began
with knots and fangs;
vows inked on skin.
Black venom stained
our fingers, twinned
snakes strangling
the marriage vein
in Celtic macramé –
cocksure monogamy.

We became one,
me and the gun,
the serpent reeling
itself from the needle.
I had few firsts left;
marriage a wild west
for the hedonist.

Snakes unspooled
like figure-eights,
symbols of eternity.
Acrimony, alimony;
Leave the moaning
to adults. We children
will be wiser
wed, inoculated –
these hickeys,
homeopathy.

I cut our paper dinner with a pair of scissors borrowed from the front desk of the hotel. I cooked with a spice rack box of crayons – sixteen colors. I seasoned the pumpkin pie with orange crayon, and basted the turkey's crisp skin in brown. I was remorseless with my sketchbook abattoir, playing the part of carnivore just as surely as I was play-acting the role of wife. I may as well have been a wax figure in a dollhouse eating the wax-scented food.

With all the strength; Love encompasses compassion, determination, tolerance, endurance, support, faith and acceptance of whom you love.

He’s always been attracted to broken things. He was the kind of boy who talked the bad girls through their problems, who defended them and didn’t take advantage. He was sensitive to his stuffed animals’ feelings, rotating their position on his bed so that a new plush animal would occupy pride of place at his pillowside every night. Soon I became first and foremost on that pillow; princess of the island of misfit toys.

I was his “little girl with the William Burroughs mind,” his “secret fairy,” “female Frank Zappa” and “window onto a magical world.” He said I fell to earth, leaving wing-marks on the ceilings of our dreams.

Transparent tubes divided Phil’s blood into shades of red, fading to straw colored plasma. I watched his fluid swirl past his shoulders and disappear into machines. He offered himself to blood banks all over the city, his plasma rushed to hospitals where it would circulate through other people’s bodies. The map of my love’s tapped arteries would look like a bloodshot eye over the city of Albuquerque. His blood bought us dinner. I dreamed he was my mother, and I nursed his arm. I wrote a poem about it, how I suckled his arm dry like a sore teat.