#winter 2003

Sometimes I lie awake

and remember soft lullabies

of my father breathing

in the yellow pages of

fairy tales while I

silently counted the wrinkles in

my mother’s curtains and imagined

why the faces looked so scary.

She told me not to be scared

but how couldn’t I be when

three little bears lost their

glass slippers on the way to

Grandma’s house as I lay

under dirty sheets silently

screaming?

The age of innocence had

passed and the faces in the curtains

went up in flames with the rest

of that goddamn house.

It was cold.

I remember that winter without heat

and now I remember the faces

were only scary because

they were as cold and pitiless

as that December I spent huddled

under dirty sheets

praying for those nights when the

fairy tales wouldn’t be

2003: Christy Turlington in Raf Simons, photographed by Inez & Vinoodh