Tag: Winter

Winter’s Edge by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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Winter’s Edge

Everyone wants warm
sticky pink blossoms.
That sick semen smell
of ornamental pear.

I would love to know
what is so bad about bare
black branches cutting indigo
frigid shadow into diamond snow.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is a Professor of French and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta. Julia has a PhD in French Literature (UNC-Chapel Hill) and an MFA in Poetry (Antioch University, Los Angeles). The author of one full-length poetry collection, three poetry chapbooks, a memoir and a children’s book, she has twice been named Georgia Author of the Year. Her work has also been recognized by the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Atlanta and Paris.

Knowlton is Guest Editor of ONE ART’s In a Nutshell: an anthology of micropoems.

After the Radiators Turn On by Elena Rotzokou

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After the Radiators Turn On

In the early dark the city is a lung
learning its own weather again—
steam lifting from manholes,
a soft animal breath that fogs the streetlights
into halos you could almost touch.

I walk past the bodegas’ bright fruit,
their oranges stacked like small suns
held in place by netting,
and the florist’s buckets—
tulips sealed in clear sleeves
like letters that won’t open until morning.

Somewhere above me a radiator coughs
and begins its long persuasion,
metal warming to a low hymn.
The pipes talk in ticks and knocks,
a code for staying.

On the corner a man salts the sidewalk
as if he’s blessing it,
white grit scattering like crushed shells.
The salt remembers oceans
even here, even now,
even between brick and subway grates.

At the bus stop, strangers become a little family
without ever looking up:
the shared choreography of shifting weight,
the way we hold our phones like talismans,
the small courtesy of making room
for each other’s coats and breath.

I think about how winter edits everything—
strips the trees down to their sentences,
makes every branch a question
asked in black against the sky.
And still the sparrows persist,
pinpricks of life
stitching noise into the cold.

Later, indoors, I peel off my scarf
and the room smells faintly of wool and heat.
On the windowsill, a glass of water
has gone quiet and perfectly clear,
holding the last light
as if it’s something borrowed.

Then the building settles—
one deep click in the walls—
and the water in the glass shivers,
a thin ring traveling outward
as if a fingertip touched it.

Outside, a siren unspools and thins,
somewhere a door slams,
somewhere a train passes underfoot
and the window gives back a faint tremor.
The light breaks in the water, recomposes—
not mercy, not lesson—
just proof that even stillness
has a pulse.

*

Elena Rotzokou is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York and a PhD student in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research focuses on Romanticism, ecocriticism, and the ways poetic form registers environmental change.

Winter 2026 by Marjorie Maddox

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Winter 2026

The snow. All morning
I’ve been shoveling it:

stab, scoop, lift, hurl,
almost the same motion

as digging a plot deep
and wide enough

for a country,
but not quite,

almost strenuous enough,
breath-stuck-in-the-frigid-air-

enough for the ultimate
attack on 350 million hearts

and their owners trying
to stab, scoop, lift, hurl

some kind of sense into
the brittle air. Now

the side of the driveway
has white walls two feet high,

but the path to the house—
a word no longer characterized

anywhere as safe—
remains a sheet of ice,

the less dangerous kind,
but still lethal. Nothing

here is anything
like okay. Stab, scoop,

lift, hurl. Get out
but don’t turn your back,

don’t put the car
in reverse. It is almost

the same motion. Who’s to say
how a movement

is interpreted
in the cold?

*

WPSU-FM Poetry Moment host, Presence assistant editor, and Professor Emerita at Commonwealth U, Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry—most recently Hover Here—a story collection, 5 children’s books, and two anthologies. Her middle-grade biography is A Man Named Branch: The True Story of Baseball’s Great Experiment. marjoriemaddox.com

Winterizing by Michael Smith

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Winterizing

The winter the snowplow
ran over our dog
I sealed the windows
against the cold
with cellophane.

We couldn’t afford
new storm windows
and it seemed simple enough
an idea, but the sheeting
tangled and balled up
and stretching it across the large windows
and getting it to stay long enough
to tighten with a hair dryer
was like restoring
virginity. I kept thinking

if I don’t pay attention
I’ll smother in my own ill-spun
chrysalis, and always with the crinkling
and sticking there was this carnal sidebar
of death and meat and the sick practicality
of preserving something for later.

I managed to make most of the
sheets as tight
as membranes but found that the least
sound from the bare woods
would drum on them
and amplify what truly didn’t
need amplification: sonic booms, the scratching
somewhere
of small dying things.

It was the year my wife mastered
the gesture of touching
her throat
when she had doubts,
and it was the year
I wagered on everything.

Now that we are here
in a warmer place and time,
we don’t have the winter need
to whisper, and yet
I like to whisper. I remember
the important sound

of a twig snapping somewhere
at 3 A.M. and waking and waiting

with dread and hope
for something else to happen.
I whispered and she slept
and the birch bones rattled.

*

Michael Smith’s work has appeared in several publications, including Iowa Review, Seneca Review, Northwest Review, Pembroke Review, Water-Stone Review, American Writers Review (finalist), Phoebe, Blue Unicorn, Avalon Literary Review, Bicoastal Review (forthcoming), Synkroniciti, Blood and Bourbon, Anacapa Review, Mad Persona Magazine (forthcoming), among others. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Arizona and lives in Pomona, CA.

Two Poems by Jennifer Mills Kerr

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Why I Write

Because yesterday, I saw a flock of birds,
circling silver-white, wings a sparkling

platinum ring, a proposal that can’t be denied.
Because I want to thread their music into lines,

or at least try. Because today my mind’s a
cellar, dimly-lit, with piles of torn fabric, and

I need to knit all my unrequited pieces.
Because somehow I still believe words

can answer our distances, our broken
relationships, every cracked window

distorting sight. Why can’t words be fire?
Why can’t they cauterize? And why can’t

I stop the urge to write when our world
declares it a waste of time? And on bad

days, so do I? Because those soaring
birds! They’ll never crash or change

or die, unlike you or I. Because the
page can be our sky.

* 

Last Light of Winter’s Day

Flying crows fade within the oaks’ dark arms,
and the lake, flickering with what light remains,
like tinsel after a holiday.

Standing at my garden gate, I’m awakened to
loss again, how it shines with what’s missing,
with what’s missed.

Loss isn’t inside lab tests. It doesn’t live within
my will or all the doctors’ visits, but sparkles
inside its own darkness–

a coin peeking from wet dirt, water blinking
at the bottom of a well, and the oak branches,
blatantly stripped,

blatantly open, now hold the light of dusk,
a whispering silver, so soft, so brief,
so precious.

*

Jennifer Mills Kerr is an educator, poet, and writer who lives in Northern California. An East Coast native, she loves mild winters, anything Jane Austen, and the raucous coast of Sonoma County. Her poems are forthcoming in The Inflectionist Review and SWWIM. Say hello at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co/

Two Poems by Penelope Moffet

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Waking

          For Lynn Way

He didn’t like to wake up in the dark.
He needed light to seep in through the blinds.
Waking in the night was waking in prison,
mind and body pinioned to the bed.

He needed light to seep in through the blinds
or he woke into a nightmare from the past,
mind and body pinioned to the bed
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine.

He woke out of a nightmare of the past
into knowledge of the present, given light,
beneath the car that crashed down a ravine,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself.

In knowledge of the present, given light,
he could laugh, roll smokes, make love,
his arms still strong enough to lift himself,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair.

He could laugh, roll smokes, make love
with his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
swing his trunk and legs to the wheelchair,
roll forward into other rooms.

With his wild tongue, though nothing moved below,
he woke me from a too-long childhood,
rolled me into other rooms,
to pleasure so intense I levitated.

He woke me from a too-long childhood,
spoke to me of how he saw the world,
took me to pleasure so intense I levitated
then came to earth, and him, again.

He spoke to me of how he saw the world,
quoted the ancient Chinese poets,
then came to earth, and me, again.
He believed in nothing but erotic love.

He loved the ancient Chinese poets
and the spinning wood lathe in his shop.
He believed in nothing but erotic love,
relied on whisky and his work to get him through.

He loved the spinning wood lathe in the shop.
It was many years ago. I was so young.
He relied on whisky and work to get him through.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.

It was many years ago. I was so young.
Now waking in the night is waking in limbo.
I’ve loved other men but now I sleep alone.
I do not like to wake up in the dark.

*

A Friend for the Winter

The lizard moved indoors when the outside air
turned cold. He flickered here and there, found
hiding places in stacked wood, under the bed,
behind boxes. When sun came through French doors
he basked on the adobe floor, on gray days
calibrated his distance from the Franklin stove:
not too hot not too cold. Spiders, earwigs,
the last flies of autumn were his food.
Once those ran out he contemplated then ignored
carrot peel and broccoli florets that tumbled off
the cutting board. A friend to wild birds,
rosy boas, rattlers, the human didn’t mind
his presence, watched where she put her feet,
talked to him. They were a sort of family,
a mesh of solitudes. The weather warmed.
She left a door propped open.
Out he went for pushups on the stoop.
Quick as a flash a roadrunner was there
to grab him and run off.

*

Penelope Moffet is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022). Her poems appear in Eclectica, ONE ART, Calyx and other literary journals. A full-length collection of her poetry will be published by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions in 2026. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she lives in Southern California.

Five Poems by Athena Kildegaard

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St. Brigid’s Day

On the first day of the month,
for luck, my husband and I say
“Rabbit” before speaking another word,
Some months it works. “Calm
us into a quietness,” a prayer
to the saint asks. But now, with
sheer vulgarity the order of the day
in our nation’s capital, luck seems
insufficient. And there is a quiet today,
the first birthday my father does not
progress into his new year. Bad luck,
his heart said, and stopped. Now the first
February 1 in 93 years he has remained
silent, the first in my many decades
I have not sung to him. How he
liked to hear it, how even on the phone
he grinned and said in his abashed
and undeserving voice, Thank You.
That gratitude being a sort of luck.
Perhaps I’m too old for luck-seeking.
The echo of his words, maybe that’s enough.

*

Winter Passage

To teach myself to pray
I walk where deer walk,
brush against last summer’s
bluestem and sedge. Bend
past arbor vitae, careful
against branch, against
abandoned hive. How swift
deer are to shift and counter;
the ample world curls
and blossoms around them.
At crack or cough they do not
hide or feint but flash.
Here, too, is path of coyote.
Red squirrel and vole
cross quick. My breath rises
in puff and volt, impermanent
marks. Two blue jays,
a junco, skirt my passage,
good companions near lake
and rush, chirrup chirrup,
no need to hurry prayer.

*

Take Hold

         after “Petaluma Olive Trees” by JoAnn Verburg

Imagine a hand moving toward you
out of the tumult. Care must be taken.
It is a crone’s hand. Let’s say it is
your mother returned, her nails smooth,
knuckles like prayer beads, palm etched
in the sweep of contour lines.
This stranger’s hand emptied itself long ago.
Imagine replacing what has been lost.
Or chanting into it, your breath damp
and smelling of lemons. Any thought can be
sustained by the disposition of emptiness.
Imagine it is your hand—thick with lichen
the color of olives—arriving out of the future.
Do not be afraid when you do not recognize it.

*

Winter

         “The house yawns like a bear.” – Denise Levertov

Snow glides down the steel roof,
shreds and fidgets past the door,
so that, when we step into the diffuse
light of afternoon, the snow cheers
below our boots a high and goofy

skirl, and we step with a light
flourish, dance even, the penguin shuffle
that keeps us centered and upright.
Thanks to snowfall the world’s muffled
and sedate. Though it’s too cold to delight

in being outside for long.
We stack the tinder, light a fire,
and are ready to hunker down
with the dog, spend the entire
evening find ways to belong

to winter: hot toddy, torrid film,
foot massage, sliced pears and camembert.
Once the moon rises avuncular and trim
we’ll go up to bed, we mellowed pair
and there embrace in our snug hibernal realm.

*

Question

We’d just eaten rice
and Brussels sprouts,
roasted chicken with lemon

when someone asked
Let’s say we had all day
with someone who’s gone on,

who would you invite,
and why? Your mother,
my father said.

I’d been thinking Emily
or Walt, but my father dropped
his history onto the table.

He was sitting beside
his second wife. Why my mother,
I asked? He had

things to say to her—
apologies to make. For one sweet
moment, I knew him as I’d never done.

*

Athena Kildegaard is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Prairie Midden, which won the 2023 WILLA Literary Award for poetry. She teaches at the University of Minnesota Morris.

Four Poems by Barbara Crooker

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THE COUPLE

Under a cloud of Covid restrictions,
ending up on the shores of hospice,
the couple set out in their canoe,

He was in the stern, steering as usual;
she was in the bow, looking for hazards.
The waves piled up; she began to bail,

while never letting go of his hand.
The journey lasted four nights; darkness
splashing over the gunwales. He grew

tired; she kept paddling. Eventually,
they started to drift with the current, which
took him out with the tide, then set him down

gently, on the farthest shore.

*

THE DREAM

          Mark Chagall, 1945, oil on canvas

The prone artist with a palette in the bottom of this painting
is conjuring up our wedding. A snapshot of us just floated up
on Facebook; it’s our anniversary. Were we ever really
that young? You in your powder blue leisure suit, me
in my Gunne Sax by Jessica McClintock prairie dress.
In this painting is what came later, le tour Eiffel, la Seine,
her arched bridges, us in la belle France. This is happiness
enclosed in the bubble of the full moon. Nobody thinks
about what comes next, how one day one of us will sleep
alone. But though I’m blue, sometimes you come to me
in dreams. And my heart is infused with the thousand petals
of the rose-colored dawn.

*

THREE YEARS LATER

I know you’re gone, but my body remembers,
especially at night when we curled into
each other, bears in a den, silverware
in a drawer. Plaid pajamas, worn flannel
sheets, we made our own sort of nest
in the winter dark. The moon, a ball of frost,
floated outside. Some nights, we heard
the ghostly notes of Great Horned Owls
as they courted, called to each other:
you you you. The way I hear you calling
my name, even though I know
you are not here.

*

PANTOUM IN WINTER

Gray day in January, and light snow is sifting,
shifting, fine white music, slanted lines.
No cars, delivery trucks, not even dog walkers.
Just this silence, and the hush of bird wings.

This shifting linear music, slanted white lines.
Notes from the leaden skies: tiny shooting stars.
There’s nothing but silence and the hush of wings.
How do we weather all these losses?

Messages from the sky: stray meteors burning white.
A stutter, a stammer, white delineating every twig and limb,
coating every tree. How do we weather these losses?
Snow geese pour out of the quarry, white shimmering

into white. A stutter, a stammer, covering branch and bark.
Gray day in January, and light snow is drifting,
snow so fine the line between visible and invisible blurs.
The difference, Nemerov says, between poetry and prose.

*

Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature. Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
www.barbaracrooker.com

Two Poems by Hilary King

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Persimmon Tree in Winter

Grand dame in orange diamonds.
Library with a hundred copies
of the same delicious book.
Last guest to leave the wedding
pocketing the leftover favors.
She poses by the pine tree,
Ignores the evergreen.
I hold my fruit late like that,
certain another summer
will reveal my good. It won’t.
I too shine best in ice.

*

How to Haunt Someone You Love

Fill a kitchen cabinet with coffee mugs.
Plain, fancy, handmade, ceramic,
Santa-faced, jacked-up jack o’lantern,
covered in flowers or cats, quotes from books,
Gifted from work, or swiped.
Fill two shelves of the cabinet.
Stack them on top of each other
so they tilt like trees in a storm
or tombstones in a very old cemetery.
Then die without telling anyone
which was your favorite,
which fit your hand just right.
Make us examine each
of your morning vessels for answers.

*

Originally from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia, Hilary King is a poet now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, TAB, Salamander, Belletrist, Fourth River, and other publications. Her book Stitched on Me was published by Riot in Your Throat Press in 2024. She loves hiking, travel, and ribbon.

First Day of Winter by Michael Northen

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First Day of Winter
           after Jane Kenyon

Orange has fled the marigolds
Sparrows search the remains of sunflower heads.
Fresh bread fills the kitchen

And on the stove soup bubbles
from the last of the turkey bones.
Let winter come.

Ribbons and wrapping paper put away
What can be wrapped is wrapped.
What can be tied is tied.

After fall’s final flourish
What is there left to do
but let winter come?

All is in readiness.
Our heavy coats hang in the hall.
The cane leans by the door.

The husks that rattle in the furrows now
were resting in the corn we sowed in spring.
Let winter come.

*

Michael Northen is the past editor of Wordgathering, A Journal of Disability and Poetry. He was co-editor of the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, the disability short fiction anthology, The Right Way to Be Crippled and Naked, and is currently editing a new anthology of disability poetry.

Winter Solstice 2020 by Bunkong Tuon

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Winter Solstice 2020

My wife takes the kids to see her parents.
I have great plans for the weekend.

I scrub dishes, forks, knives, and place
them in the strainer. I clean the sink,

use stainless steel pad to remove
grease on the sides of the oven.

I windex the glass window.
Darkness lasts forever

Nowadays. The dirt is cold, hard.
Cold rain washes away January snow.

The soil is frozen, bare and dark.
The sky is dark, lonely.

Has it always been like this?
My wife’s yiayia passed away

the same week Toni Morrison did.
My Lok-Yeay passed away

in another state while I was going up
for tenure. My hands and feet are cold.

My uncle said that on her last night
Lok-Yeay opened her eyes and spoke

to people she hadn’t seen in forty years.
She was back in her village.

I sweep the floor, organize mail, scrub the toilet.
I sweep, scrub, scrub, and weep.

*

Bunkong Tuon is a Cambodian-American writer and critic. He is the author of Gruel, And So I Was Blessed (both published by NYQ Books), The Doctor Will Fix It (Shabda Press), and Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry). His prose and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Lowell Review, Massachusetts Review, The American Journal of Poetry, carte blanche, Diode Poetry Journal, Paterson Literary Review, The Mekong Review, Consequence, among others. He teaches at Union College, in Schenectady, NY.

Three Poems by Jane Ann Fuller

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At the Corner of Orchard and Second

In 1989, I lived in a duplex, mid-fix, 9 months
pregnant while the man I married drove

206 miles one way twice a week to weld continuous
Rail for CSX. One room was a peninsula of windows

that leaked heat but leveraged light like
a crystal, so I begged him not to board it up. He smelled

of diesel fuel and I could hear his Jetta turn
the corner of our block when he was back

for pork chops, chocolate pie and sex.
When he was home he mostly slept

or plumbed the crooked floors or punched
out horse-hair plaster walls or left

at 2:00 pm for pulled pork sandwiches
and cans of Busch. Sometimes I’d leave

to find him laughing on a bar stool.
Everyone said what a good woman

I was. We believed together
we’d make something better

of the rooms we’d soon rent out.
When you work and ask for nothing

more, you think you’re right. One night
the baby head-butted me on the bridge

of my nose and someone came right out
and asked who threw the punch.

Today, I run my palm against the grain of velvet
of a doe that stands outside my house. The doe is real.

Its coat, soft as air. I lied about the proximity of hands.

*

Everything’s a Version of You

We thought it might be dead. Remember,
when the bat got in? Trapped
in the shower, it circled the glass, clung
with suction cup thumbs,
dropped like a rag.

I don’t know what we thought.
So, we shut off lights, opened doors.
Through the moonlit kitchen
into the foyer, quick as it entered,
—out it flew.

It’s been twenty years since
you left the house, drove
until first light, found a place
to die on Tick Ridge. You could have been
sleeping in that grove of hickories.

Bats still cloud our streetlamp like
the opening of a cave. Stars slide into
constellations I try to name. Everything,
a version of you here: the bat, little Lazarus
lifts from the floor into a black

sky shot with stars. Once chained,
Andromeda’s a galaxy, freed.
Dead, how brightly, she
courses for a billion years
toward me.

*

The End Of Winter

When I think about the end
of us, I’m chopping onions.
In the distance, a train on the tin horizon
blows across tracks where I could be waiting,
holding my paisley suitcase.

In February, snow knows no boundaries,
blankets us in oblivion. We like it
at first, being tucked in, immobilized
by our lack of control, kick into survival mode.
Portable propane heater. Check.
Coleman lantern, check.
Things seem possible.

When rain begins, ice pelts the ground,
6-8 inches of snow. I’m peppering the roast
when the lights go out and everything powers down.

While we wait for men in cherry pickers to reach us,
we tell stories in the near dark.
I barely conjure the blizzard of ’78,
but you say you’ll never forget
snow stacked so high it reaches the eaves.
You have to tunnel out.

As if what happens, happens twice,
my story of the storm is a white field,
days blown with a random neighbor kid
the winter before the summer
I met the first boy who broke my heart.
I was 14. We both played trumpet in the high school band.
I hear he has twins and isn’t sure he loves his wife.

It’s never the end until you say it is. Darkness holds
us to the heat of love, blankets doubled over like a rug.
In the cold arms of a weigela, a fat cardinal sings.

Scoops of seed, cakes of fat start the frenzy.
Starlings in their midnight feathers, linen finches
flit from suet cage to barren tree, sing their tinny tune of survival.
All they seem to know is survival. Pretty little savages.

*

Jane Ann Fuller’s poems have appeared in such journals as The American Journal of Poetry, Shenandoah, Still: the Journal, The MacGuffin, jmww, Atticus Review, Sugar House Review, Waccamaw, Northern Appalachia Review, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere, and in such anthologies as I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, All We Know of Pleasure: Poetic Erotica by Women, and It Starts With Hope, (The Center for Victims of Torture). Her collection, Half-Life, was published in 2021 by Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.

Waking to Winter by Sally Nacker

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Waking to Winter

I wonder whether I woke to heaven:
the wood all clouds. Out my bedroom
window, only two tall black trees
stand clear, the pines mere smears
of soft watercolor green. Am I afloat
in this new, white-veiled world?

I feel my own breath now, and
the winter dawn on me,
understand that snow, not clouds,
swirls through the wood. Head
on my pillow, I study the squall, lost
in wonder, feeling I woke to heaven.

*

After Soft Pines, watercolor by Holly Hawthorn

*

Sally Nacker was awarded the Edwin Way Teale writer’s residency in 2020 where she enjoyed a week of solitude on 168 acres of nature. Since then she has moved to a small house in the woods. Publishing credits include The Orchard’s Poetry Journal, Blue Unicorn, One Art, Mezzo Cammin, Quill and Parchment, and The Sunlight Press. “Waking to Winter”—in a slightly different version– will be part of the 2022 BRAG Ekphrasis VI exhibit at the Fairfield University Bookstore in downtown Fairfield, CT in April. Kindness in Winter is Sally’s new collection. Visit her website at http://www.sallynacker.com.

Insomnia in Winter by Jessica Purdy

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Insomnia in Winter

Puddles merge to form a lake in the driveway.
Plump drops almost snowlike hit the window.
The house is falling into the earth. A sinkhole
eats the garage. It’s getting closer to the kitchen
as I speak. The sump pump drones on mindless
in the basement. My sleep ruined, I’m awake
at 3 am again. It’s not my friend, this un-time.
Undermining and obsessive, my thoughts are brain
worms squirreling into the crevices.
Clothes and bed damp. I don’t want
any fundamental things. No hierarchy of needs here.
My wants are outside myself, but they live inside me.
They burrow down. Earthworms disappeared
back in September. Leaves were disappeared
in November and the blowers have come
and done away with their garbage. What haven’t I done?
Well, I haven’t needed to pee in a while.
I drank water 5 hours ago. The backs
of my knees are slick with sweat. Everything
is damp in December. Who’s got their lights on already?
Their twinkle covers bushes and trees
and glows against the houses. I feel that old
feeling of looking in from the outside.
Briefly I imagine I’m meditating. I’m looking
at myself from above. A fat earthworm
unearthed and bloated in the driveway. Even I have a heart.
Anytime now it’ll be spring again. First I’ll need
to drink a lot of tea. Heat up the car.
Oh, now I’m not meditating anymore.
Was I ever? When the windows fog
I’ll turn on the wipers, the defroster.
Wonder if ever again I’ll see flowers emerge.
Won’t their little expressions be otherworldly?
Won’t they achieve their own greatness
without even looking in the mirror? Their clean faces
scrubbed of any of the dirt they came from,
they’ll subside. Resume their longing
for the days when they had only
themselves to care for. Even the bees
will have had their fill of riches. The worms
will have done their good work. The soil will shrink,
dry out, and lie just as dormant as any old coffin. 

*

Jessica Purdy holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. Her poems have appeared in many journals including Hole in the Head Review, Museum of Americana, Gargoyle, The Plath Poetry Project, The Ekphrastic Review, SurVision, and Bluestem Magazine. Anthologies her poems have appeared in include: Except for Love: New England Poets Inspired by Donald Hall, Nancy Drew Anthology, and Lunation. Her books STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House were both released by Nixes Mate in 2017 and 2018. Sleep in a Strange House was a finalist for the NH Literary Award for poetry. She is poetry editor for the upcoming anthology, Ten Piscataqua Writers: https://www.tenpiscataqua.com/writers/. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaPurdy123 and her website: jessicapurdy.com

Two Poems by Julia Caroline Knowlton

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November Song

Praise gray skies, wet yellow
leaves fall to red edge. I wonder

why dark winter moves voices
to fear every day, every night

of the dead. How hard we try
to cover fear with wrong things—

hot meat gravy, a fat gold watch,
words of wool, light cheer.

November song, empty me out
to cloth without paint, barest

branches, a cup without wine.
Move me to snow on evergreen pine.

*

Meditation in Winter

I draw an angel halo on paper,
believing only in paper

not the gold shape itself.
I light candles with a red-hot match.

I sing a bitter song or sweet,
peel apples into butter and taste the past.

I write faint words, wash a dish.
Enter crying darkness coming at last.

*

Julia Caroline Knowlton is Professor of French at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta and incoming President of the Georgia Poetry Society. She has an MFA in poetry from Antioch University and a PhD in French Literature from UNC-Chapel Hill. The author of four books and an Academy of American Poets prize winner, she was named a Georgia Author of the Year for her 2018 chapbook, The Café of Unintelligible Desire (Alice Greene & Co.). Her second chapbook, Poem at the Edge of the World, will be published by Alice Greene & Co. in 2022. Julia regularly publishes in journals including One Art, Roanoke Review, and Boston Literary Review.

In Defense of Winter by Lynda Skeen

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In Defense of Winter

The December oak tree
is not lazy or dead.
My winter is
deeply resting,
dreaming,
refracting a drop of frozen winter light
into quiet bliss.

*

Lynda Skeen lives in Ashland, Oregon. She has been published in a variety of journals, including The Halcyone Literary Review, North American Review, Tiger’s Eye, Lucid Stone, Talking Leaves, Main Street Rag, and Poetry Motel.

Winter’s Toll by Melanie Figg

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Winter’s Toll

The deer are starving.
Summer was too dry and snow came too soon
and too thick. They usually don’t come out
of the woods until February. It’s almost Christmas
and they’re in the trailer park by ten.

My mother died a week ago.
We cleaned out her refrigerator,
found two bins of apples
she had no energy to can
and left them for the deer.

After bar close I drive in slow: two doe and a fawn.
For a minute I feel lucky—to see animals so hungry
they’re at front doors eating
Christmas wreaths. One doe swings her head,
watches me park and go inside
my mother’s house. They keep walking,
looking for apples on the snow-covered lawns.

*

Melanie Figg’s debut poetry collection, Trace (New Rivers Press) was named one of the 100 Best Indie Books of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Melanie has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The McKnight and Jerome Foundations, the Maryland State Arts Council, and others. Her poems, personal essays, and book reviews can be found in dozens of literary journals including The Iowa Review, Nimrod, and The Rumpus. As a certified professional coach, Melanie teaches creative writing, offers women’s writing retreats, and works one-on-one with writers and others. http://www.melaniefigg.net

Two Poems by Maria Berardi

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December, Cutting the Tree

Shadows on canvas of snow
dancing, eye-catching –
winter’s flowers.

No matter how brilliant the sunlight,
in the cold under the trees
night holds its own.

We bring the spruce home
because it carries this darkness:
a green nearly black.

*

Winter Solstice

Despite the word’s meaning,
the sun does not stop
though we do, into nameless dark:
Here’s the reminder.

*

Maria Berardi’s poems have appeared online, in print, in university literary journals, meditation magazines, and at the Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities. Her first book, Cassandra Gifts, was published in 2013 by Turkey Buzzard Press, and she is currently at work on her second, Pagan, from which these poems are excerpted. She lives in Colorado at precisely 8,888 feet above sea level.