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.

we kissed and sparks set us glowing, our limbs live wires— unpredictable, electric. we burned like July suns, blazed like August campfires, heartstrings tendriling like smoke, fingerprints branded to thighs like hot iron. we were humid dusks, all firefly bodied, voltaic heat lightning. all this time i thought this was an endless summer when really, it was a burning.

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 –>

is parched ivy stitched to my ribcage. July climbs my clammy back and leaves behind evacuated shells that tug and scratch, crumble, cling, crack between fingers too eager for winter solstice. They are not wrong to mistake this skin for a graveyard. They are not wrong for wanting to hang all that weight on someone else’s shoulders. I don’t know why they’ve chosen mine: small as creek stones, fragile as bird bones. But I carry them into August, pray for an early fall.

August smells like sunscreen and ripe peaches, skin stained like regret: indigo rose, all the daisy chains we never made, friendship bracelets we forgot to bead and braid. August is nobody’s girl, volcanic heart, liminal sword of light where two curtains meet. Already she swims in grey tulle rolling in from September like coastal Maine fog. The silver lining: the mosquitos are migrating mudward for winter. We are past July. We are no longer drowning in the deep end of humidity. I am no longer a child. The maples shuffle the cards and cut the deck; lay August, like a wet sheet, out to dry.

        Where for once,        we don’t chase daylight— daylight chases us,        smears her honey hands across         our sun-starved backs                 until we glisten        like newborns plucked ripe from the womb.

I am such        a summer thing, such a bath full of brine, such a Salish Sea         siren screeching to nocturnal vessels at midnight.        O, but in daylight,        look how my lion prow sheds        salt scales         & tilts her gilded face        toward the sun.