I imagine her ribcage an icebox swollen with freezer burn; her heart— once a blooming geranium—glazed with dry frost, black with bite, the candlelight of her aorta having gone out with the last crimson petiole of the season.

I imagine her pupil swallowing sweet slice of winter’s tangerine sky—her one eye unblinking—in empty hope of efflorescing jade, pine, pistachio out of slate. I imagine sun dripping into ink, blue pond black with it, swan stained with it; Sylvia plucking one of the fouled feathers, now useless to him—the poor thing—but a bottomless well from which to scrape endlessly the poetry of December’s brooding sunsets.

after Diane Lato

I wake to trees gone skeletal, frosted chrysanthemums, fits of ginger where the sky hangs, death of things glaring as sunbeam upon pupil.

Already, December dresses up in her whites and golds—trades her emeralds for silver when moon swells full, sealing me inside my shadow self for winter.

Clam shut in subnivean burrows, I am opaline. Water makes a home in my marbled body, solidifies, and threatens to rip my heart’s skin open like a broiled peach.

Say it: say that I am dead, and I’ll root my feet into the earth, unfold my lips: into petals: into your palms, shed summer from my shoulders.

There is a time for winter, for mending the bones, freezing off the dead things so new life can grow more lush, more violet.

The slabs of ice caked over my irises will melt into lakes, these lips one day will bloom. But summer has lasted a decade: I am in the winter of my youth.

after Jimmy Santiago Baca

Today, running along the creek, I have a lot to be mad about, a lot to pop open a bottle about,                                         the sunlight traipsing through                                         but the trees won’t have it,                                         their steepled ceiling refuses                                         to keep me blind to the way ice layers                                         along the creek edges like shelves—                                         bracket fungi gone alabaster.

I am masked for the winter. I could feel caged. I could feel suffocated,                                         but below thirty-two, air cools the clouds of my breath                                         to crystals on my lashes. They catch the starlight                                         and moonbeams and I am the fairy face of winter.                                         How can I be mad, all silver sparkling like that?

It’s a glimpse of spring in January, gossip of daffodil, tulip embryos too eager to meet sun. The night has a thousand

eyes, and I learned in December how to undress, unashamed, in front of them; their pupils lingering on me into daylight like perfume on a left wrist.

Under snow’s weight, we swallow the rich, care not for the slow taste of sweetness, desire only salt and copper, fat and marrow—feral cure for winter.

the fox hears the rabbit screaming. it is a terrible thing, twist of a knife, portrait of a throat on fire.

what is it like to be god? to be cinder blooded? to weave dreams into nightmares? be the thing that goes bump in the night?

it is hysteria. it is black roses and ash-burnt lungs. it is beating the wind with raven wings, stirring skies into phantoms and moonlight into tricks. it is crumpled paper in a fire, disintegrating, as if it never was.

June is a blossoming, a testing of freshly wringed wings. July is cottonwood ethereal one minute, thunderstorm electric the next. Things get hazy in August, s   l    o     w like dripping honey. August is a lazy crawl to the end of things, the weight of things, the last gasp of summer air before Earth begins her next trick: falling apart to come back together. August is dewed grass, hydrangeas in heady collapse, respite from rain, a final bloom, monarchs releasing and spreading their tigered wings to the south. August is willow tree wisdom, an understanding of endings and youth, cerulean blues that sprawl into pink and lavender sunsets, nostalgic dusks, then endless stars plunging through the surface of Lake Nokomis. One last trip to the seaside, one last chance for walking barefoot through the woods, splashing through the creek, a silent prayer that we’ve sown and grown and nurtured something worth reaping.!– Your poem content goes here –>

I wonder what it is— the sorbet colors of sunsets, dawn’s warm cheek on her surface, her vastness rocking eternally from tranquility to turbulence

—that brings the ocean to tears constantly; her eyelids, briefly filling with water and salt, rubbed raw with the things

she can no longer carry: a tangle of seaweed, a dead jellyfish, bottles of heartache and soul-stuff she was unwillingly burdened with.

stuck to low tide ribs— the limpet— a little oil, a palm of embers