Leveler Poetry Journal
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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