Nebunele.com

Because I haven’t put any fresh poetry up in a while…

Snow Day

I picked up my student
from her seventh-grade classroom.
We drove in companionable silence.
I turned on the heater
and then the radio.

The car before us on the freeway shed
mists of ghostly snow,
which snaked back and forth across the road.
The frail whiteness danced over the pavement,
merged with the exhaust,
careened in the wake
of speeding tons of metal
vibrating off dry, nervous ice,
swirling, skittering,
refusing to melt.

“I heard it’s record-breaking cold right now,” said my student.
“They said on the radio that if you went outside
and you were naked for some reason
you would get frostbite in less than five minutes.”
She looked at me to impress upon me the danger.

I cannot forget her words.
We are close—so close!
to grabbing our keys
forgetting our underwear
stepping outside to meet the ice-bound world,
murdering us from the skin in
in just the amount of time it takes
to don warm socks, shoes, gloves, and a reassuring coat.

-Alissa