LOVE IN A HOPELESS PLACE

Our first kiss
was next to a pile of garbage.
We laughed about how Philly it was
on a sidewalk so uneven
I would believe a monster of the week
had surfaced through it.
It was hot
in a time where there was no such thing as
unseasonable
anymore.
I thought I had it figured out – 
I have two hands.
I can hold the fluorescent, bubbly giddiness in one
and the weighty, leaden sorrow in the other.
Both can be true.
The man huddled on the pavement
will likely be jailed for losing the cold embrace
of a paycheck in a landlord’s economy,
and still I marvel at how our hands fit together.
Politicians will play ping pong with my body
in the name of meeting in the middle,
and still I find it thrilling to climb into your lap.
Our 1040s
and the religious institution that unwittingly grew us into weeds,
flushes cash into annihilation
and still I have the audacity to raise butterflies in my stomach.
But falling for you
as the soft apocalypse
shuffles unfailingly forward
has taught me I was mistaken.
Being with you has not changed how much burden
I have heaped into my baggage
but it makes me feel lighter.
And I know, intimately, that the crystalline fragility of joy
feels obscene in the wane of humanity,
but the choice is not happiness or despair.
It is to be numb
or to care at all.
And you care.
You do good
with no score to settle,
just to make the rigged game,
with its plastic station wagon of colored pegs veering off course,
easier for other players.
So if it all burns
whether because the greed finally melted us down
or we torched it to start over
I will kiss you as it rains ash.

Hillary Steinberg is a New Yorker living in Philadelphia. She is a sociologist and researcher. Her fiction has been featured in The Sociological Review Magazine, and her poetry has been featured in Buffalo (8x), Poetry Ink, Collide, and Eastern Sea Bards.