We began days trying to feel that we had a body, then going back and forth between bodies. Each day decided if today was a day for fur or a day for frozen air. Down the road was a friary where friars lived, some in long brown robes and some in donated jeans. St. Francis stood near a sheep field, covered in different kinds of shit and rain. I met another American there but she didn’t want to talk about being American. She gave me a plastic cup of white wine which surprised me. I didn’t know the monks drank. “Friars,” she said. There was a small house where they kept the newly dead. Brother Giles died and I knew he was in there. Different friars would take turns sitting with him. The sun sparkled there rarely over an apple tree and turned the stained glass into candy lozenges. Dirty sheep sniffed it and brayed into a gray body of afternoon. Afternoons lasted a very long time. A large animal that we lived inside: our planet. It stirred things, kicked them up, destroyed property. But there was love there. That’s what I forgot. The animal was love. Inside it we were planets.
Julia Story is the author of the full-length poetry collections Post Moxie and Spinster for Hire and the chapbooks The Trapdoor and Julie the Astonishing. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.