At night the fluffy snow hardens

From fleece light as dust to heavy as frozen rocks 

I like to cross the field where it’s untouched, artificially smooth and rounded as plastic 

So my boots crunch 

Breaks the silence of the abandoned field

The story will be full of heads resting on shoulders. The hum of cars, buzz of bugs. Collecting books to never read. A love so forceful and magnetic 

it has to be ancient—

As in, this love, whose fantasy you live in 

All day, who somehow manages

To fuse sorrow and pain and awe.

The love will need a few months apart,

A series of sunset stills, Live Photos, sent. Received.

Long nights alone. Explosive

 fights for misread texts, 

ambiguities, trauma 

rage. Forgiveness, 

then forgiveness, 

learning to forgive,

practicing forgiveness, always

Forgiven.

then losing count. Impulses and living and

out in a field of poppies 

we finally reunite and 

we’re happy. Or 

Too broken.

Maybe the home we would build and she’d pick the paint. She lives there 

when you sleep far away 

from her warm waist. Stop

 now—come back. Be here 

With the snow 

crunching under your boots. 

You live in the cavity you 

call a loving heart. What’s left there? 

A ghost roaming 

a dark field 

4 in the morning lit by the snow reflecting the only street light

in the dead of winter. She’s asking, 

how it can be 

you don’t know where you are in the story. Less the world, it’s not guilty. Remember.

Listen. There are millions of hearts 

spinning on their own axis and circling

the same sun, puttering through the city around her. Each heart has suffered its own losses. She adds, and still is suffering. Remember, the city is an injured animal 

with a will to survive. Forget the history,

we need strength, distance, not PTSD. 

You’re letting it haunt you, how they greedily plucked its skin for gold until it was raw. You hear how it whimpered in pain as they threw rocks so the sound of rape would stop, raped of everything. This is where you let yourself get stuck every time. But follow along. Well-meaning people— yes they exist— gave it water, a bath, food and a place to rest, checking it’s vitals and redressing wounds. It needs to rest. So do you.

Someday it’ll be released back to the wild, hopefully soon. She tells you this is where you are in the story, and this is when she says, repeat after me—there is no character, only me. Questions of 

What? How it can be that full belief and full doubt live in the same room, share a bed? Why? Why is a dead end, as if standing on the edge where the world ends. I’ve started back to the city I love. I’m scared for when it wakes, bruised, to hold it through the pain. When it realizes. Hold on until healing, I’ll say. We’ve failed; I’m so so sorry. Ill keep going. Listen: crickets are cheering, the wind is whistling prayers, and the hollow between passing cars harmonize and beeps gather and the people. They’re here for you. On the perfect winter blanket I let the cloudy sky lay me down into the glitter of the snow.

2/28/22

etgwert