Coughing Up Tinsel & Crystal Flakes by the Open Fire I Saw Mommy Burying Santa Beneath the Snow Baby, It’s Cold Outside, But I’m Safer in the Blizzard Chronically in Love (but Only Under the Mistletoe) O Naked Tree (Let Your Freak Flag Fly) Lips Like Agony & Cranberry Velvet It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Crime Scene One More Dose of Eggnog and Xanax Handing Out Presents Wrapped in Secondhand Prose Black Ice, Blacker Hearts Jingle All the Way (Out of My Responsibilities) Laughter & Cheer Swells (with Spiked Tears & Seasonal Affective Disorder) O Holy Marijuana Cross! All I Want for Christmas Is Silent Nights & a Lobotomy

after Iris in The Holiday

And I’m not even playing the best friend. I’m a background extra, a passerby across the street from a coffee shop window, a grey-clad office cog hidden from the nose down behind the boundaries of her cubicle. If snowfall is a confession, I’ve been holding in a blizzard of alone time, lights off, avoidance, if only. For god’s sake, if only I were more brave! If only I were snowflakes and starlight, self-portrait of a dining table center piece, a thing that doesn’t need fixing! It was a game all along, and I was playing the thimble when I should have been the race car. For god’s sake, tear loose the unopened letter! Burn the things that took me from me: selfish man, corporate conga, realists sucking the lore from my palms like fairy tales are poison, my fingers the wounds. For god’s sake, hold the embers carefully in both hands! Ignite them with the waxing sun, and see what birds fly back!

after Susan Walker in Miracle on 34th Street

In a woman’s power to bewitch the weather. In feeding a ghost back to flesh with enough candlelight, crackling vinyl, and poetry.

That the moon is an eye witnessing oceans leached of life, earth heave its battered lungs, the trauma of it all, and waiting.

In the childlike wonder of dormant dreams begging to be unstacked of brick, untangled of ivy. In the body’s ability to carry

after Frosty the Snowman

falling like repeated documentation of a funeral flowing underneath frozen film. Winter, a widow grieving with frozen tears. Her face, a pale sadness; but how can I not mistake her saltwater cheeks for celestial objects, collect the glistening on my lashes like light-catching ornaments? Outside, brumal wolves howl their pellets of ice, and I hold the moonlight between my teeth. I am a garden of recovery, nestled beneath amber fireplace flames and blankets of white, so viciously understanding the need to bury and blanken, bleach the blood out of the sheets. We won’t survive life, so we might as well grasp tinsel in a blizzard. Even when the cold chases off the wild geese, the daylilies, the monarchs. Even when the wind rushes its own tail with a knife.

I don’t want to eat you, I just want you wrapped in wool, caradamom, and candle light.

I want you to break free from the prison of night into a vanilla maple London fog, white-laced

and gold-bowed. If I can’t have you warm by the hearth, I will have you for dinner,

and I don’t have a taste for snow angels frozen in time. I want you to be the prey

I only come out in the rabbit hole of night.                 It’s not a miracle.

​        We no longer align. You want to lay shadows to rest in the ground.

I want to wear them like a cloak.

​        When I was human, I wished I was the moon. Only the walls listened. Only the endless blue horizons

carried me through the night-blooming jasmine landscape of girlhood, the claws of the one

No spotlight, fanfare, point to pushpin on a map. It happens quietly, the way you write a poem like robbing a grave, guided only by memory and starlight, metal muffled in the loam. Every year becomes a footprint in the snow. There are still good hours left when sun sets before afternoon has finished its tea. Fireworks turn into candlelight, the wax weeping rivers for you so that you can forage for joy where, once, the fog refused to lift. Pumpkin spice no longer aftertastes of existential dread. The woods scream at night, and it’s just the coyotes. You learn to embroider without patterns. You know exactly when to leave.

pair of jeans, early-aughts-Renaissance-style corset top, grey military blazer that’s been making me look cooler than I am since the twelfth grade

no longer fits is always met with denial. I squeeze my shoulders into the armpits, loosen ties, hold my breath, limit the constricting garment

to morning outings, change back into sweats after my second meal, when the buckle can no longer contain my hunger. A few more tries before I tuck it back

Maybe we were never star-crossed, flames tossed over skies drowning in indigo and Jupiter’s moons. I don’t know if I knew that it would be love or heartbreak or roadkill stranded on asphalt, but I knew it was an asteroid, meteoric impact, apocalyptic collision. The first moment I saw him feels more like an omen I never saw coming until the prophecy laid itself out like a soiled sheet on the yellowed mattress. His red t-shirt an expanse of warnings I disregarded for the kaleidoscope hazel around the black holes of his pupils. Maybe I give the heavens too much credit. Maybe I died when I was nineteen, and the ghosts inhabiting my body are echoes of misremembering. Maybe we were just reflections on black ice, bad timings, misplaced mistletoe in August.