Kissing under a maple leaf, amber as the ghost of sunlight in November. I want to press it between pages, memorize it by hand and midnight.

Barren trees claw at the sky line like hell’s sinners grasp at heaven. The world outside is dying, while something inside me wakes. I adorn myself like an altar

for the dead, fill my hollow heart with chrysanthemums and marigolds and frost bite. I’m dreaming of mornings that rain teeth, nights like mulled hauntings retold

December defaults to fields of frost. Distant lanterns glow in the apocalyptic fog spread over the prairies like puddles of blankets on childhood’s living room floor. I bake sugar cookies for my inner girl, cradle her with clammy hands like a gentle reclamation. When the temperature drops and the nights yawn early, I salt solstice oil in stars, glaze the walls in bonfire hues, sun catchers hooking the hearth fire and casting out homemade auroras across the table wearing rings of kept vows and formative years. December, they call you a slow death, slick street on a starless night, but you are the foundation in my architecture of growth. You made me pick up my pen again.

The long walk home is a lip’s distance away, mere breaths between greetings and goodbyes.

I wear the forest like armor—a ritual that keeps me soft on these endless clean days. There is a sanctuary

of stillness in the midwinter wolf song, a blank page on a cold, velvet throat. My memories of younger

days are scars that keep me warm while snowed in at the metro station: a sun-child born on the apex

I lock my sadness in a storage box with a bedsheet that knows, too well, the architecture of my body. I hold the chill in my lungs a little longer, exhale at the boarded up house on the edge of town, a light left on like a Yule flame, nasturtium bookmark tucked into the loam of a silent night. This is how you survive yourself: you gather your aches and rebuild them into a bonfire, let the warmth hold you like soil hugs the roots of a grave under haunted prairie grass. Sometimes it’s scary, but you can douse long drives and longer silences in starlight. You can bury a memory in the perfect shade of walnut and dirt and wait for spring. Dawn always cracks like eggs on cast iron. Your reflection always smiles before you do.

They tell me not to romanticize ghosts, but you are the celestial break in a black night, iridescent spill of aurora borealis over snow, and I am a deer in the glow of Christmas lights, willing our shadows to touch what our flesh won’t. They tell me not to dig up graves, but I am filling your head with tomb-laid forget-me-nots. I am a rain-soaked notebook confessing soggy truths in a ceremony of flickering candles and cracking roots, mistakes I’d make again if it meant tethering my moon to your night. You taste like cinnamon and bad decisions I want to wake up regretting. They tell me not to raise the dead, but your eyes are blurred and beckoning, and I am starving for the haunt.

I was trying to survive the misty melancholy mornings of an ancient anguish like a third marriage breeding children of ink. I was lethargic with seasonal transition, yet restless with becoming, inspired by the cadence of sleet turned flurry, harmony of the quiet, eyes in the cornfield flickering like fireflies now almost extinct.

If sorrow is a sickness, I am terminal with constellations of sadness. My winter coat has more structure than my life, but feather and thread can’t type, can only keep me upright for so long, and I cannot waste a rare moment of golden apricity, cracking December’s cardinal egg shell, bruising in the brumal lake of your email.

Everything I know of hunger and hibernation. Evenings in with my sleet of thoughts. Body clocks out of sync in the middle of this nowhere. My ache reeks of evergreen, my bedroom of manufactured vanilla and cardamom. What do you believe in when the last smear of light fades beneath the snow? Why do tiny things break me more than big tragedies? November’s quiet hum, December’s hand full of performance. The little mess you make screaming into the pillow. The dark bloom inside surrender. At the core, I will always be that sixteen-year-old girl with crayon renditions of Van Goghs in a sketchbook and no friends. Pain has a pulse and mine thrums like a phantom lullaby dripped off a ghost tongue. Strange enchantment. Conkers under muddy boots. The coat hanging by the door, still waiting for winter’s call. Yearning will survive as long as I do. Only a fallow page can torture a poet. The trees let go first; now it’s your turn. Take two more and try.

Nightbitch after Rachel Yoder’s novel Nightbitch

I would stain December gluey red. I would bring you rabbits in my teeth. The frost has bite, and so do I.

I don’t owe the world my lungs, but I howl the quiet out of the milk-blue morning anyway, sprint peppermint spirals in the indigo mists

of my own breath. I would curl up in December’s furrowed brow, smothered in the comfort of fur and raw satisfaction. I am learning to love myself

We trim the tree of its evergreen and dance with moons between our palms. We cloak our summer freckles in wolf skin, slip on our rabbit feet, speak in Morse code to the snow. We plant soft magic in ordinary hours, bleed out over silver lawns. Bruised knees, raspberry mouths, violet bellies— every bloom’s a shadow after midnight. Every woman behind glass is an animal waiting at the shore of attempt between seasons’ breaths. We lie down in the hollow of the darkest night, where sleep-leaden thoughts can constrict and sprawl. We are scars softened by rain. We are nearly dead, but we have each other. Together is a beautiful place to spend the long way back.