The Haunting of Winter People
Patches of flattened brown grass
like those that would peek
through snow, a mid-March
yawning into spring.
Dust motes masquerading
as silver snow trickling
from above. Dendrites
settling without shivers .
The fossilized riverbed
begging for cold fingers
to play crystalline tarantellas
down desiccated spines.
Mud caked deer prints
the echo of white snow drifts
etched with broken hearts
that mend when melted.
A stripped maple smooth
as icicles sheared and raw
under the moon’s cool
and unblinking glare.
Exhalation from an open freezer
that whispers like a long deceased love:
How can this heat be anything
but apocalypse? The answer –
A painting of a cabin in a forest
carpeted in soft white
with footprints that lead toward or away,
a lost trail, invisible
under sun and summer sweat
that never ceases, while winter
becomes an artifact
in the amber of memory.
Permafrost
How did we get here?
Weighed down by the unsung
sorrys in our pockets, dragging
the hems of loved ones
like beggars, seeking
a redemption colder,
more remote than the tops
of distant mountains.
Even though permafrost
never melts, it still blooms
in summer, green blades
pearled with buds. And if
it does melt, if somehow
that ground, known
for its hardness, its inability
to change with seasons,
suddenly finds change rooted
ripening in the hard soul
of its body, carbon kept
cozy and restrained
between soiled arms, then
the silent bomb will spill
like our emptied pockets, eking
secrets into soft places, destruction
that comes like a warm pillow
across a wet mouth.
It’s the simple things that bring
us to our knees, that make us
ask how did we get here? And also
is there any way back?
Lesley Hart Gunn
Lesley Hart Gunn is the winner of the Fall 2022 F(r)iction Poetry Contest and has upcoming or previous publications in Carve Magazine, Strange Horizons, Litmosphere, West Coast Review, Avalon Literary Review, Flash Fiction Magazine, Phantom Drift Journal, and others. She is originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, but currently teaches college writing at Utah Valley University, where she lives with her partner, three children, and two cats.
