The house at the end of the block was covered in windchimes.

Hundreds of them. Like gangsters in West Side Story, they danced in slow circles. One got closer. The next one snapped. Then they jilted back a few steps and clanged against the wall. Echoes of tin reverberated off car roofs and satellites. Crept under my door frame and animated my hands to stroke the hair of my clammy lover....

In March the river ran red

Mercury in the water and the fish were all dead

A young miner boy

Callused hands and a military cap he wore tilted

Hummed and he hawed about going to prison

I hugged him most nights in his hammock for one

Strung up in my branches

His heart was undone

There was a girl in the village that sat down stream

Merely fifteen and cute as could be

But the mercury had give...

Before Mimi met Mark she lived with Renee in a narrow brick rowhome on a wide street with cracking asphalt and buzzing electric lines. The walls were thin and the windows wide. In the summer their skin stuck to one another's when they sat on the couch. That time of the year the structure would betray them, the oak floors warping and black orbs budding up and spreading in vines from the ceilin...