People get really excited
about the fact that snowflakes
are unique, different,
irreplaceable,
as if uniqueness is synonymous
with beauty.
Every sore back,
every pulled muscle
earned while shoveling
those snowflakes is unique as well.
No one celebrates
the sore backs
or the pulled muscles.
I knew there’d be a cloud-covered sky hereon the night of the lunar eclipseknew itI readied my eye for red moonfelt cheated whenever swirls of gray rolled infirst measurable snow forecast instead, an occasionI’d normally […]
An old friend of mine could sense storms by smell. When I asked, she said they smell like water. I must have smelled water a million times, but never like this, she claimed. When a storm’s coming, water smells like soil and metal, as though the earth is cut open and the storm is its blood, pouring out into the world.
It had been months since I’d spoken to her.
“Smells like a storm,” I said one day over break. Nobody listened to me – they had more important mysteries to solve. I hadn’t really been talking to them, anyway. The fog made the sun a pink and hazy fingertip, smearing its oils over the sky. Conversation carried on as though I hadn’t said anything:
First date
The wind comes in fast, raising clouds of sand, burning their eyes as they run. They hide under an overturned rowing boat. They kiss, the first and last time.