I‘ve got a new soundtrack crashing through my head on tonight’s run. It’s not as harsh and fast as usual, but it is beats with intent. That passion is pulling me along the streets narrowed and rimmed with a collar of stubborn snow, making me juke ice drifts stretch to leap cold stands of water. I am mouthing the lyrics and when they sing love I touch the tip of my tongue to the edge of my front teeth and it is delicious and fierce and I am lit up.

This is the day that once my whelping bitch of a mother spread her legs not to receive my twisted stick of a father but to issue me forth. What my mother had wanted was an abortion, she would tell me, without apology, when I was eleven. By the time I was seven my father had decided I was no longer a worthy investment, making his initial intercession to get me born seem like a simple cruelty waiting to be paid forward.

Tonight my only companion is a fuzzy crescent moon and that is the way I want it. He is rolled over on his back, exposed, and if he had the guts to come down here and face me I would grab him by his horns, wrestle him down, and tear out his belly with my teeth, the same teeth I tap with my tongue when I say the word love.