seeing ourselves.
in winter windows and at school security checkpoints.
For anyone who’s tracking the slow progress of the returning sun, it’s still dark here in the mornings when I wake up. In the kitchen where I wait for water to boil, I look across the backyards and see the golden rectangles of illuminated apartment windows.
There’s a woman across the yard flossing her teeth in the window that she’s facing, using the glass and darkened January sky as a mirror.
Diagonally across from her is a man whose head and shoulders tower above the privacy glass of his shower window. His is not a passive shower, hot water running idly over shoulders and limbs. It’s work; a holy sloughing of skin. A baptism; every inch polished and scrubbed.