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.

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.