by Sarah Mills

 

Mornings, we had an insatiable appetite for snow.
I served burnt toast, raspberry jam, egg-white snow.

Don’t you want to be happy? she asked, as if I could enter
happiness like the address of a website, store gigabytes of snow.

I knelt on a chevron rug and prayed while listening
to ruby-throated hummingbirds migrate. On the skylight, snow.

The meteorologist’s predictions were sharp as stalactites.
He assured me: below 32 degrees Fahrenheit—snow.

When I was a child, snow accumulated for days, like teeth
overcrowding Earth’s mouth—an overbite of snow.

I ask the postal clerk how long it will take happiness to arrive
in my mailbox. She sells me insurance, offers to expedite snow.

At night, his ghost visits me wearing a puffer jacket and red scarf.
He hovers above my bed like a satellite—midnight snow.

I gather the glitter from a broken snow globe.
It glistens like a future, a sword, an armored knight, snow.

These words fall like flurries and land on a blank page.
As the author of this poem, can I copyright snow?

The universe’s indifference gives me frostbite, so I rub my hands
together. With these sparks, I’ll write and recite snow.

The Tragicomedy of Sarah Mills. A curtain rises, a curtain falls.
Just before the lights dim, enter stage right—snow.

 

 

 

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Sarah Mills’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, trampset, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Rust & Moth, Pithead Chapel, Beaver Mag, Identity Theory, The Shore, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She is online at sarahmillswrites.com, and on Bluesky @sarahmillswrites.bsky.social.