A travelogue:

There's only one insect species native to Antartica.

And there are no Polar bears on Antarctica.

Not that it's too cold. It's a question of migration.

The requiem mass isn't meant to be cold.

But to the dead it is.

The high mass for the dead isn’t sung on Antartica.

It’s too cold for the organ's pipes.

For a moment, she was cold as ice.

This was due to her awkwardness.

She was young and so was I.

This happened behind the billboards

next to the bocce lanes of the inebriated Marconi Club.

I remember her dress patterned with butterflies

and her black sneakers. We were bike riders.

We went to church because we were told to.

I was an altar boy for the same reason.

No girls allowed, and you'd be hard-pressed

to find a girl who had an interest, and besides, 

it wasn’t their time. It was the time for Priests

and confessions and rebellious explorations,

and during a mid afternoon on a cloudless day

from behind the billboards among the stiff meadow grass

we listened to the old-timers betting with their Italian excesses

at the rails of the bocce lanes, and in the distant future

the backlit screens would come to announced to the world:

"William is with Norina Bellissima".