It was a winter of muted wolves
and colorless owls without voice.
We spent those first few months together
in an apartment with occasional heat, sporadic electricity.
Puddles of wax appeared in dark corners;
sometimes we burned the books we’d just read.
No one else will share the story of the squirrel frozen
to the back railing which we slowly warmed back to life
or how we managed to steal a trickle of vitality
from the highest sphere above the northern world.
We had little, but felt like we owned so much,
inclined toward motifs of capricious impulse
until the fires of our branding cooled and glazed,
the quietness of the night sky broken into silence.
What goes unsaid in darkness is so often
everything that could possibly matter.
by Richard King Perkins II | photography from Alicia Krawchuk | Featured Image by Kristin Soh