Lies We Tell in Winter
       

            That winter there was a density to the snow. I told you stories
about Bird City, Kansas, unscrewed the glass jar of silver pushpins
            and dreamed myself a sun-washed Selinunte temple.
Dreamed myself a crippled pet returned home.
            Dreamed myself a child making angels in the snow.
Outside families arranged and walked in curls to the coast.
            That winter I invited you to a maze you could find your way out of.
To a quarter mile drag strip that I constructed next to a red line cemetery.
            I said think hard when you hear I will and I can't ten times an hour.
One winter there was a deep path dug by my hands,
            traveled by the children who got out of school early,
attenuated by the sky warming itself because it was bound to. I admired it
            only to erase it. You look out the octagonal window and find absence
consuming what was there yesterday. It's undoing the roof, displacing walls.
            You do the odds once and dream it all back: a cooled thicket
of well-trained angels reaching through a long-held death and finding permanence.

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Copyright © 2013 Tasha Cotter All rights reserved
from Some Churches
Gold Wake Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission