Night unwraps herself of paperwhite and cellophane. The smell of winter’s arrival lands like a starling on my shoulder, lingers like chimney smoke in my hair. Permanently branded in a script rehearsed too many times to be true, I bury the echoes of my sorrows in the quiet. Snowfall and nostalgic lamps cradle me to sleep. Winter blanket as a sacred rite. Instead of killing myself, I wrote this poem. I silence the porch light. I hope you get what you deserve.

A white expanse can either reel in a lion fish or a sturgeon from a deep well, or baffle the poet to her knees.

If the latter, the poet freezes solid, waiting for spring to thaw like a miracle, a hole in the ice, an aha! of house sparrows returning home

to rebuild their nests. The tomb-bound poet confides in the moon that listens but offers no answers. Silence beckons like a small mercy.

Rest.

To give to dark tides, take advantage of more time spent with the stars, tune in to one’s circadian rhythm, and turn in early, lulled to sleep by lunar lullabies and celestial noise.

​​        (My secret is a weighted blanket, ​​        a low-spun ceiling fan to ebb the heat, ​​        a pair of crew socks, ​​        a Benadryl.)

Retreat.

To build a nest of fleece and pillow in front of the hearth fire, circle three times, and settle down with a fantasy fiction, knitting needles and yarn, a bowl of yam and lentil soup, one’s own thoughts and a pen.

Every man was a weapon. I, a vegetarian turned cannibal to survive their machetes and unzipped denim.

What does it mean when the dream version of a gentle lover from your past hunts you with a knife and a Bible

in a war-torn country? Who can you trust in a kidnapping when everyone giving you orders—even the one begging you to trust them,

eat the plum you’re supposed to feed them but hide the pit—are men? In the dream, I eat fried octopus, and I like it. In the next dream,

I am unbearable and unhinged. I cannot hold my tongue back from its urge to mock and trill, my throat from spewing its song vomit of improvised musicals—so one-note and limited in vocabulary, but a songbird all the the same. I am made of maybe and almost, saving all my finish lines for overdone daydreams and underdeveloped poems, but I can entertain myself for hours and long weekends with only my words and imagination. I’ve lived such a fortunate, average life, I have to rely on secondhand sorrow for a good cry, someone else’s someday-maybes to convince myself to stay. My seasonal affection disorder never really goes away, which is to say, I can burn like the last candle on the longest night of the year and blizzard in July. I am heart-shaped marshmallow twinkling in a coal eye. I am a broken clock refusing to be abandoned. I am setting down the minutes in my own time, never caging the barn swallows and loon songs that bloom like arias from their seeds.

after after Kate McCallister in Home Alone

Cinnamon stains for life, so tip it over, wet your hands, coat your fingers in the umber, and trace me from freckle to freckle so I become a sky of constellations on nights when the moon hides her face from the stars. There’s a fine line between poet and muse, and the dark laid out like a sequined cape on snow skates right down the middle. If the perks of long train rides are setting albums to the shifting countryside or tucking into a Victorian gothic novel, the perks of longer nights are more hours to dream of sun. More time to catch the starlight beading in a metallic tang on my skin and seal it in a jar before it vanishes into dawn’s dull grays and watered down tangerine. I’d live in winter’s oil fields forever if it meant holding onto these auroras, these death lamps, this lunar lantern in my palms for a thousand graves and thousand and one lifetimes.

after Mary Oliver

Every morning unfolds itself, first in strips of charcoal linen,

​        then swaths of slate, gauze of gold.​        The great unwrapping.

And I don’t want to get out of the bed that has cocooned our body

heat—and the dog’s—into a furnace, ​        but there is the kettle to warm,

the gingersnap Chai tea for tongue to try.

​​        The poem will not write itself!

I’ve been reading about shadow and evil in fairy tales and greeting mine

after Ellen Griswold in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

So let’s cry out our pine needles into the carpet. Take advantage of the longest night of the year and swap our conscious for shadows—who can tell God from a devil in the dark? The stars blink out. A mouse stirs just to prove a point. Roaches scurry to the bulbs to subvert the plot. No heartbreak’s killed me yet, but morning might if I don’t take the snowy path home and dilute my dreams with fire— my unconscious the only safe place to keep a flame burning from dusk to dawn. I would dampen my clothes and succumb to the cold if it meant I could escape the slow agony of a mall store’s ten-track Christmas playlist, become a ghost, and haunt you year-round with Mariah Carey and Wham!. If you’re not miserable, are you even whole? I am a sleet storm of sorrow, and it’s not even the solstice. The best of myself is yet to come.