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.

after Love, Actually

Tilting your head away from the sun to greet your shadow like a long lost twin. The moon is a silver ornament, an old lover’s name you can’t stop calling out in the dark. A mug of tea can fix everything—or at least, makes morning reading a little more cozy, tongue a ballroom of twirling ginger, cinnamon, blue cornflower gowns. The first snowfall is a slow dance in the oven bulb of midnight. The wind searches for a weakness, but you did your due diligence: the boots, the coat, the yellow mittens, all good money spent. You’re running out of time to spend it all in the past. Sweep this year right under the rug and stamp on it. Zip and tie your armor. Lose yourself in winter’s froth. You have such a beautiful life to live.

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