Winter Skin

Winter Skin

There’s a crack in your skin
that opened and gobbled up
your freckles whole,
the freckles that hid
(from your dark passenger)
on the bridge of your nose,
and on your cheeks,
where your blood now pools.

The gravity of winter’s dry silence
nursed the moisture from your skin,

flakes fell to your floors of
jaundiced linoleum,
blanketed your favourite things
(the things that fail to crack
a grin, or a memory)
with a layer of neglect,
and became
indistinguishable
from dust.

Your sun-stained skin,
your glow: swept up
with a broom of gray straw
(that once, too, was golden)
and an oxidised pan,
along with all the other
detritus and dead things
we no longer
consider

(beautiful.)

Snow Eater

­­Snow Eater

A poltergeist
teases the ice
cemented to my window,
fervent, like a raptured toddler.
Snuck past sleeping giants,
huddled
against the façades
of my buried fortress,
giants
that do not stir.

Its relentless,
clumsy gait
derails trains, fells
ramshackle hamlets,
turns tundra tropic.
Flays January’s comfort blanket
from loam—
the blanket that
steals sleepy breath,
cozy dreams;
freezes coyote lungs.

Hurricane prairie monster.
It’s arrived.

Warm. Moist. Heavy.

Violent.

Dough

Dough

I am dough;
Hold me in your palm.
There I will rest
And warm your clay hands,
Where blood has fled to safer havens.

Squeeze me; hold me tight.
Like a tree promises its leaves
That they, one day, will fall,
I will slip through your fingers
As darkness escapes an open drawer.

Tiny Floating Tin Boats

Tiny Floating Tin Boats

I feel sorry for the patient stars
Watching us watch them
From distances only light can travel
Waiting for us to greet them
From tiny floating tin boats
Bearing flowers born of the corpses of dead men.

Planets passed will line the streets
Like tin soldiers in a dollar store fiction
With hung heads hiding timorous faces
From thin-crusted sailors
In tiny floating tin boats
Seeking to set flame to burning immortal shores.

We will call our mothers from tin can telephones.
Our ingenuous words will travel the length of that taut string.
But our string will have snapped:
Prudence is not a virtue of a child.
Our tiny floating tin boats will rust
And the stars will revile at our asininity.