Tonight I Am the News
Pipes stubborn, winds within
… nothing offends::
Two feet in just as many days, the snow’s complicity
with wind. A morning’s cup with want of milk.
With cardamom. A winter’s bowl of lentils.
Carrots sluggish from the bin.
How to entertain the sullen senses?
Breath escapes the structure of the teeth,
the eye turns in
from light, heat,
this house of skin like straw, last
of pine-wreath needling the leaves of the poinsettia’s
faded ribbons.
How to live in just the basement,
buried in the drift
of woolen socks?
Of mittens.
What news of war?
White engulfs the color of my hands. My hair
a nest of scents. A torso
in rictus of ash.
Kathleen Hellen |