by Christine Jones
And the goldfinch on the thistle.
Christine Jones lives, writes, and swims along the shores of Cape Cod, MA. She is founder/editor-in-chief of Poems2go, a public poetry project, and an associate editor of Lily Poetry Review. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including 32 poems, cagibi, Sugar House Review, Mom Egg Review, Salamander and elsewhere. Her debut book of poetry is Girl Without a Shirt (Finishing Line Press, 2020). cjonespoems.org
by Casey Knott
Imagine you’re in China Town, San Francisco—
the year doesn’t matter. You’re eating Dim Sum
in a small café. From the window, the sidewalk
is a glinting drum upon which the children
smile. Buckets carried on brooms on the backs
of elders. The ceaseless pockets, the sea of spices
and dried mushrooms curled like tiny octopi.
A bottle of Sprite sweating on the counter.
And now a woman a table away telling you,
you should try this one—some rice and things
rolled in a banana leaf and steamed, the history
she shares of these little nooks of rice
tossed in the river after Qu Youn tossed his life
into that river in some poetic lament against
his kingdom some 2000 years ago. The rice to feed
the fish so that his body would remain under stars
upon stars. They worship the dead in their boats
shaped like dragons, their offerings of rice.
And the pride in her sockets for the story
that pools in her bones and forms her name.
Ours is a lineage we wear like a locket that knocks
against our breast in some form of hope.
Imagine loving your body.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Casey Knott is the author of Ground Work (Main Street Rag, 2018). She edits The Wax Paper literary journal and her poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Gulf Stream, Storm Cellar, Harpur Palate, Red Rock Review, Cold Mountain Review, Midwest Quarterly, Alternating Current, The Meadow, and Rumble Fish Quarterly. She lives on an urban farm in Des Moines with her husband and three kids.
by Luna Dragon Mac-Williams
(after Terrance Hayes)
As soon as this all is over, I can’t wait to have dance parties again.
Just like this. My mom said, and my dad pulled her in close. It was
10:32 on a Sunday night and the blue light bulb he screwed in
tight was leaking liquid mercury on our white-tile dining room floor.
Not actually. Let me begin again. Sergio Mendez and Ciara.
Michael Jackson and Roy Ayers. Don Omar and Daddy Yankee.
Sean Paul and a DJ called Spiller. Chanteuses and crooners
crowding that track that never got credit for voices that haunt these
Chicago house-built houses. I unscrew myself and let my elbows fly.
I think, you could track a lifetime in songs stuck on repeat. Hermanita
next to me, all bones and limbs and lithe aliveness, says, this is why
I love this family. Ma and Pa forget the fight they’ll probably have
later, let love bubble up without catching in their throat, let their
bodies catch light from the other’s smile, and I see the couple who
kicked off the floor, so they always say, at every club, every party,
and I see where I get my abandon. At 11:11 I wish for a lifetime of
impromptu dance parties. Let me begin again. At 11:11 I wish for
a world of dance parties. Let me begin again. At 11:11 I wish for a
dance party so good it deconstructs self-interest. For a groove to
catch, a beat to drop, and it all to shake down okay. With this verse,
my mama praises the patients she’ll wake up and take to tomorrow.
With this chorus, my dad pushes back the attacking signs that he
might have colon cancer (?). With this bridge, hermanita says, I
miss this when we go too long without. I spin her like we learned in
dance. My dad says, you could be twins. He says, Luna, you could
lead those cha-cha lessons on cruise ships. My hips, boyish but
heartbreaking, laugh. Tracks later, Pa trickles off y hermanita
también, and Ma and I are belting about twenty-something sadnesses
she hasn’t grappled with in some time but I’m wading my way through
presently. Between taking her hair down and kicking off her shoes
she says, baby, you deserve the world, and I almost miss it.
If I get this world, I will bring it back to her.
_______________________________________________________________
Luna Dragon Mac-Williams is a playwright, poet, actor, dancer, jeweler, editor, educator, and undergraduate student at Wesleyan University. She is a proud Chicagoan, born and raised. Her one-act, “Good Strong Coffee,” premiered at Chicago Dramatists through Pegasus Theater in winter 2018. She has recently been published in Ariel’s Dream. She believes in sweet coffee, wishing at 11:11, and helping youth honor and share their personal narratives.
by Therése Halscheid
We went where the wind insisted across the frozen river
to reach an abandoned fish camp, a desolate place.
The hat I wore was of wolverine fur — it was like that
in the arctic — for the tribe I stayed with used every part
of what they caught, and the animal was blessed for everything
it offered, and what it gave of itself went well beyond food.
Up river, twenty-some miles, we parked the snowmobile
to climb an embankment but our boots sank suddenly
we were thigh-deep in snow. Couldn’t lift out. Needed to
grab hold of something, though there was nothing to cling to
only firm gusts of wind and a fistful of flakes.
Our hands went down to balance our weight, to lift
our boots from the depths of the windblown drifts,
hoping the snow would hold as we crawled like wild animals,
Kim and I, like a wolverine might have,
had one been there. There were imprints in snow
that Kim said were lynx tracks. When she mentioned
they were fresh, a fear came coursing through. Still,
we inched along while the snow held us, it held as we scaled
to the spot where some cabins were. And where the racks were
for smoking salmon in summer, and a frozen field was,
and behind the field a forest of enduring spruce.
Their boughs were weighted by snow
but beyond that nothing could be discovered.
The lynx that came had gone.
Seemed the land wanted nothing upon it but winter.
It could ward off anything by what it wore.
_________________________________________________________________
Therése Halscheid’s poetry collection, Frozen Latitudes (Press 53), received an Eric Hoffer Book Award. Other collections include Uncommon Geography, Without Home, and Puddinghouse Press’s Greatest Hits chapbook award. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Gettysburg Review, Tampa Review, Natural Bridge, among others. She has taught in varied settings, including an Eskimo tribe in northern Alaska. She lives simply by house-sitting, as to write on the road. Her photography chronicles her journey.
by Margo Taft Stever
My body opens
like a telescope
from bed, always
groping for
blood, for oxygen,
for stars, for
points of light,
for little idio-
syncrasies of light.
Sphere, cylindrical,
press near
my ear, my tongue,
move sinews—
snap, slap,
the skein of skin.
Hawks, dogs,
everything runs
the other way,
the end-stopped rain-
drops, little tablets,
their curved
bellies slap and flop.
Below, the ship
enters—boat,
prow, and bier.
The hill is my bed
and I lie down, seasick—
suddenly, a woman.
________________________________________________________________
Margo Taft Stever’s collections include Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019); Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019); The Lunatic Ball (2015); The Hudson Line (2012); Frozen Spring (2002) and Reading the Night Sky (1996). Her poems have appeared in Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Verse Daily, Plume, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, upstreet, and Salamander. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York (www.margotaftstever.com).
by Joan Kwon Glass
When my father left,
his old leather couch
kept his shape.
When I climbed up
in my Sunday dress,
it was safe.
His absence held me
like a throne.
He was dead, or gone.
My mother saw me, or not.
Jesus was coming
or he wasn’t.
Eventually, it didn’t matter.
What mattered was my body
perched on the hill
behind our house
atop the emptying field
in spite of everything,
What mattered were the unseen
creatures that burrowed
beneath the hill, grinding forward
in the darkness.
What mattered was the familiar
hum of my own hunger,
how long I could go
without
as somewhere else,
loaves and fishes
multiplied.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Joan Kwon Glass is a biracial (Korean/Caucasian) second generation American who lives near New Haven, CT. Her poems have recently been published or are upcoming in Sublunary Review, FEED, Anti-Heroin Chic, Ghost City Review, Rise Up Review, Dying Dahlia Review, Black Napkin Press, Vagabond City Lit, TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, Literary Mama, the print anthology Shimmer Spring, and others. Her poem “Bathing Scene” was featured on the Saturday Poetry Series: Poetry as it Ought to Be, and her poem “Cartouche,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Arc Light
by Kylie Gellatly
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Kylie Gellatly is a poet living in Western Massachusetts and a Frances Perkins Scholar at Mount Holyoke College. Her chapbook The Fever Poems is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2021. Her poetry has appeared in Malasaña Magazine and Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, with book reviews in The Rumpus, Adroit Journal, Green Mountains Review, and Pleiades. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Green Mountains Review and is a reader for Pleiades and Anhinga Press. Kylie has been awarded the Factory Hollow Press Scholarship to the Juniper Writing Institute and has received two fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center. For more, visit www.kyliegellatly.com
by Millie Tullis
Mary
always framed
in folds
my mother
too wore
loose dresses
in church
her body
old wonder
working
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Millie Tullis is an MFA poetry candidate at George Mason University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sugar House Review, Rock & Sling, Ninth Letter, Juked, GingerbreadHouse Literary Magazine, Mud Season Review, and elsewhere. She serves as the Assistant Editor for Best of the Net and Poetry Editor and Social Media Manager for Phoebe. She lives and writes in Northern Virginia.
by Susannah W. Simpson
Psychiatric Ward, Bed 23 Window
When pleaded with to finish
your dinner tray, you say:
I am contemplating the virtues
of the mind vs. the sins of the flesh.
You believed, to feed yourself
fed all Evil in the world.
As war news blossomed on TV,
you became thinner, then cadaverous.
A doctor’s son, you had been stuffed
full of promise, Catholic school and Latin verbs.
Lamb of God—you take away
the sins of the world, have mercy.
Soon your crisp, plaid shirts and khaki
pants hung and billowed, sails on the mast,
and your speech came like purple loosestrife
along the expressway, unexpected bursts of color
shuddering from the sheer force
of what passes by.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Susannah W. Simpson’s work has been published in The Homestead Review, North American Review, Potomac, The Wisconsin Review, South Carolina Review, POET, Nimrod International, Poet Lore, Salamander, Sequestrum, SWWIM, Xavier Review among others. Her poem “Lily” was anthologized in Full Moon and Foxglove by Three Drops Press, UK, and her book Geography of Love & Exile was published by Cervena Barva Press (2016). Susannah holds an MFA from Bennington and a PhD from SUNY/Binghamton. She is the founder and co-director of the Performance Poets of the Palm Beaches Reading Series and an Associate Editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal.
by Annie Breitenbucher
is more slow
waltz than hip hop.
A stretch at first is more
awkward lunge than shiny ballet.
I’ve dropped from first to ninth in the
batting order—and so stand at the batting
cage among those who cannot envision that
movement requires effort. Thinking I’ve earned
either their admiration or pity. Wondering if
they’ve started to smell the leather and
grass, hear the pop of the ball in
the mitt, feel the slight breeze
that slows the heart beat,
see the dirt it hurts
so much to leave.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Annie Breitenbucher is a technical writer living in Minneapolis; she previously worked for the Star Tribune newspaper where she covered the sports of running and triathlon. Her first poetry collection, Fortune, was published by the Laurel Poetry Collective. She has also had work published in two anthologies: Beloved on the Earth: 150 Poems of Grief and Gratitude (Holy Cow! Press) and The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal by Minnesota Poets (Nodin).
by Hayley Mitchell Haugen
at least we are safe in our homes.
She thinks of her own mother
during the Blitz—four kids,
and bombs dropping, sandbagging
the incendiaries, the rationing,
evacuating to awful conditions,
and the “doodlebugs?” I think of shabby
Ohio hotels, the lice my sons brought home
from preschool. But really, the Nazi missiles
looked like small planes, Vengeance Weapons,
they called them, buzz-bombs, fired
by the hundreds into south-east England each day,
their jet engines whirring like a field of common insects:
when the motors cut out, the bombs fell.
Imagine having that fear constantly,
my mother says. Once, my Nana heard
that tell-tale stop and her body did the thinking:
she threw the infant—my mother—
into the indoor shelter just before the blast,
just before the glass doors exploded.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a PhD in English from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington; she is Professor of English at Ohio University Southern in southeastern Ohio. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online (https://sheilanagigblog.com/) and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
by Natalie Martell
April 2020
unable to sleep, i stare at blue light
late into the night—death tolls, ransacked shelves,
bleeding maps. poison, but also remedy—
abby’s message about violets & morels in her yard,
your photo of a home altar: red cloth
holding oak cross, water & flame, dried lavender,
cedar, a rosary of small moons. i think of your craving
for touch & ask the moonlight to brush fingers
through your hair in seattle. soak you in glowing
until you drip with it. somehow, mom, the days keep
breaking. spring is a myth every year
until it unfurls. still, my body is a molting tree—
at the slightest wind i flake shards of myself
to the dirt, falling a hundred times over. instead of working,
i read about microbial life surviving in frozen lava
beneath the ocean floor. inside microscopic fissures
& the pressure of atmospheres, the cells shiver,
alive. i gaze at van gogh paintings
on the met website. the full image shows a fused
landscape, but mom, in the close-ups, the scene
shatters. iridescent movement blooms in wet ribbons,
writhing like fish. i can witness each reckless flight
of the artist’s hand, rendering cypress & wheat
from tangled ochre, titanium, ultramarine. all is illuminated:
the anguish of his gestures, the quivering gashes of darkness
where time has fractured the strokes. why does beauty
make me ache? the brushstrokes sing & grate
against my bones. mom, i saw your bird again
today. i believe you sent it from cherry-blossomed streets
lined with boarded-up windows. on a branch outside
my room, a black-capped chickadee’s two-note song
bends down as though to mourn, as though in prayer.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalie Martell is a queer writer living in southern Minnesota and working with adults with different abilities. She received her MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Flyway, and elsewhere.
by Natalie Martell
April 2020
unable to sleep, i stare at blue light
late into the night—death tolls, ransacked shelves,
bleeding maps. poison, but also remedy—
abby’s message about violets & morels in her yard,
your photo of a home altar: red cloth
holding oak cross, water & flame, dried lavender,
cedar, a rosary of small moons. i think of your craving
for touch & ask the moonlight to brush fingers
through your hair in seattle. soak you in glowing
until you drip with it. somehow, mom, the days keep
breaking. spring is a myth every year
until it unfurls. still, my body is a molting tree—
at the slightest wind i flake shards of myself
to the dirt, falling a hundred times over. instead of working,
i read about microbial life surviving in frozen lava
beneath the ocean floor. inside microscopic fissures
& the pressure of atmospheres, the cells shiver,
alive. i gaze at van gogh paintings
on the met website. the full image shows a fused
landscape, but mom, in the close-ups, the scene
shatters. iridescent movement blooms in wet ribbons,
writhing like fish. i can witness each reckless flight
of the artist’s hand, rendering cypress & wheat
from tangled ochre, titanium, ultramarine. all is illuminated:
the anguish of his gestures, the quivering gashes of darkness
where time has fractured the strokes. why does beauty
make me ache? the brushstrokes sing & grate
against my bones. mom, i saw your bird again
today. i believe you sent it from cherry-blossomed streets
lined with boarded-up windows. on a branch outside
my room, a black-capped chickadee’s two-note song
bends down as though to mourn, as though in prayer.
_______________________________________________________________
Natalie Martell is a queer writer living in southern Minnesota and working with adults with different abilities. She received my MFA from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salt Hill, Flyway, and elsewhere.
by Lupita Eyde-Tucker
I don’t need anything
from your trip across town
though I always wrack my brain
for that elusive thing
that might complete the chore,
the day, perhaps my life.
I don’t need anything
from the store, nothing
that can be bought or sold
definitely not one more thing
to add to the pile of things
filling up my closets now.
I don’t need anything, really,
except a moment of your time
to look at this picture of a duck.
It’s not a great picture,
But that’s not the point,
you see, I am the duck.
Indulge me a moment longer.
to look at the duck a different way.
See something new?
It’s also a picture of a rabbit.
I am the rabbit. Yes, I can also be a rabbit.
I don’t need anything. Nothing
bought or sold, but thanks
for taking time to look at my picture,
which is really what I want most.
But please—don’t get stuck on the rabbit.
I am still, and will also always be, the duck.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lupita Eyde-Tucker writes and translates poetry in English and Spanish. She's the winner of the 2019 Betty Gabehart Prize for Poetry, and her poems appear in Nashville Review, Asymptote, Columbia Journal, Raleigh Review, Women's Voices for Change, Yemassee, and Chautauqua. She's currently translating two collections of poetry by Venezuelan poet Oriette D'Angelo. Lupita and her husband live and homeschool their children in Florida. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at the University of Florida. Read more of her poems at: www.NotEnoughPoetry.com
by Mary Block
A little bitter, like eating a grapefruit
with my grandfather,
with his tiny, toothy knife
designed specifically for the job.
A father of daughters,
he’d learned how to eat without wincing.
He knew how to leave for work
or whatever.
To leave the girls at home.
The boys catch sharks and barracuda
in a boat roaring back at the ocean
cracking against its rigid hull.
This city was built to defy the weather.
It was pulled from the sea
by boat builders in exile—
people raised with the knowledge
that pigeon and dove are two shades
of the same bird.
Between my dreams I tried to remember
the name for a lookout.
Nest came back to me first, then crow.
I blessed my boy with the flesh
of a sour fruit, with salt,
with the sign of the cross.
The school has hired a guard with a gun
but still.
I fed my boy my body
for so long.
_______________________________________________________________
Mary Block is a Miami-born, Miami-based poet. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Sonora Review, and others. Her poems can be read online at SWWIM Every Day, Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, and elsewhere. She is a Best of the Net finalist, A Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist, and a Pushcart Prize nominee. More at www.maryblock.net
by Natalia Conte
Like all dark moments, their entrance
begins with cello, a low grating C
like the bow of a ship digging into ice.
I know there’s danger in the rippling
of sound, the way the air seems to boil
with urgency. Of course, this signals
their arrival, the aliens, their bodies like hands
reaching from halted wrists.
Dr. Banks keeps her hands close
to her body to stop them from shaking.
She scrawls the word human
on a small whiteboard, points inward.
Drawn in dense billows of ink,
their language chases its own tail
does not distinguish between beginnings
and endings. We cannot write with two hands
synchronously, our mind can’t know
where the phrase may go if given the chance
to roam. I am more conscious of my hands
than ever before, the way they hang, palmy,
like nothing good. I wish I could stop
their tendency to reach for everything,
try to cradle every moment in case
it’s the last of its kind, a near
extinct species. Moments of sharing
sweat with strangers under concert light,
bodies being stirred into movement by the
same beat. Empty gestures of goodbyes
when we knew we would see each other
soon. Touching hands without glass between.
I’ve never wanted to hold anything like I want
to hold language like a mathematician
break its parts into sequences
and make small moments
mean more. I want an algorithm
for the feeling of fearing
your own kind, a lack
of variables in the equation
for compassion. I want
to touch each syllable where the
meaning lives, watch them quake
under the tug of my pen, its little billow.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Natalia Conte is an MFA candidate at NC State University for Poetry. She has been previously published in So To Speak Magazine, The Pedestal Magazine, and others. She has been nominated for Best New Poets and is an assistant poetry editor at Narrative Magazine. She works at a busy coffee shop in Raleigh, NC where she also resides with her tiny black cat Zen.
by Maria Teresa Horta translated by Edite Cunhā and M.B. McLatchey
São os versos
os crepúsculos
são os dias
são os mares
a saliva
a mão aberta
na luz de bruços
ao meio-dia
são os gestos abissais, a dor incerta
São os verbos
os segredos
a alquimia
são os doces
lábios
e o seu excesso
os impulsos do gesto
onde se erguia
o contorno do corpo mais perverso
São as vozes
singulares
as melodias
são os rigores
das formas
mais diversas
a inventarem-se só
porque impediam
uma ansiosa posse tão incerta
São as sílabas
intactas
as utopias
o torpe
o passado
o pesadelo
sonhado durante
a alvorada
o suor alagando o meu cabelo
São as dúvidas, possivelmente a noite
no labor da escrita desatada
tudo aquilo que é táctil e por dentro
se enovela no fio da madrugada
Por vezes surge ainda um gesto mais sedento
e em seguida o voo, o golpe de uma faca
no lado voraz do pensamento
quando o amor não quer dizer mais nada
They’re the verses
the twilight
they’re the days
they’re the seas
the saliva
the open hand
in the back-light
at noon
they’re the abyssal gestures, the uncertain pain
They’re the verbs
the secrets
the alchemy
they’re the sweet
lips
and their excess
the impulses of the gesture
where rose up
the contour of the body most perverse
They’re the voices
singular
the melodies
they’re the rigors
of the forms
most diverse
inventing themselves simply
because they prevented
an anxious possession so uncertain
They’re the syllables
intact
the utopias
the clumsy
the past
the nightmare
dreamt during
the dawn
the sweat drenching my hair
They’re the doubts, possibly the night
in the labor of unfettered writing
everything that is tactile and internal
entwines itself in the thread of dawn
Sometimes an even more thirsty gesture surges
and then the flight, the stroke of a knife
to the voracious side of reflection
when love has nothing more to say
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maria Teresa Horta was born in Lisbon, Portugal in 1937. At 82 years old, Horta continues to be recognized for her association with two fellow poets, Maria Isabel Barreno and Maria Velho da Costa. In 1971, during the fascist Estado Novo regime, the three women (known thereafter as “The Three Marias”) wrote a collaborative work entitled Novas Cartas Portuguese (New Portuguese Letters). The book was banned, resulting in a trial that attracted worldwide attention and identified the three writers as feminist icons. In 1974 the regime fell, and the charges were dropped. Nevertheless, the imprint of an oppressive regime endured for Horta—both in her consciousness and in her poetry.
Horta has always considered herself, first and foremost, a poet. She has published 21 collections of poetry. She has also worked as a journalist for several Lisbon publications during the 1960s (one of the few women to do so) and interviewed such renowned literary figures as Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and Christa Wolf. She edited the magazine, Mulheres (Women), and wrote plays and fiction pieces. She is most renowned as a poet and political activist. She lives in Portugal.
Edite Cunhā is a writer, artist, and activist who believes that creativity can transform the individual as well as society. She leads multi-media art and writing workshops for people of all ages. Cunhā has a BA from Smith College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Massachusetts.
M.B. McLatchey earned her graduate degree in Comparative Literature at Harvard University, her Master of Art in Teaching at Brown University, and her B.A. from Williams College. She was awarded the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal; she won the 2013 May Swenson Award for her debut poetry collection, The Lame God (Utah State Univ. Press), and Finalist Place in the New Women’s Voices Competition for her book Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). Her most recent book, Beginner’s Mind, will be published with Regal House Publishing in 2021 and explores the question, “How should we educate our children?” Currently serving as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is an Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.
by Katherine Fallon
I kept finding your things: a drop of blood
that took root in the carpet of your bedroom,
your mother's antique trivet, the Beta fish
we got together. He was red, or violent blue,
and lived in a canning jar. He was the seven
swift cuts along your arm when he swam
like a whip toward his food, was the current
at thaw, the sound of ice floes crashing
against the river’s still-frozen banks, the days
we forgot him for each other. I loved him
more with you gone. One night I left him
by the window too long and he grew a suit
of hirsute frost. In places, he glowed through
the dull rime, lustrous as mineral, much like
the way your makeshift tourniquet—
bleached white dishcloth I held with one hand
as we rushed through town in the snow—
had bloomed into showmanship.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________