The summer you were gone

 

I counted nine spider bites

 

Clustered together on one of my vertebrae,

 

A small circle in the middle of my back.

 

Nine:

 

one for each time you’d left me

 

and each time you had returned

 

head bowed

 

shy when you took my hand.

 

Knowing I would let you.

 

They appeared the night I read of the boys

 

the three of them burned in their beds

 

just before the march of the Orangemen.

 

Since your retreat I’d spent each night

 

reading of car bombings, crumbled homes,

 

destroyed churches.

 

Slowly,           I felt the spider bites shrinking

 

beginning to heal

 

and suddenly I longed for the redness of them,

 

marking me.

 

It was then that I began to ache for the scent of you, that I learned to pray for your return.

 

When I began to wish you were anything but Catholic and gone.

Originally published in White Wall Review 25 (2001)