Adrift

Adrift:  The drone of a blizzard supersedes the static. I sip my tea and wait, bob the bag-on-a-string and inhale the steam, wait for the crisp silence that will return eventually, the absence of sound that slips over everything when the wind finds itself spent and sullen. Strands of thought present themselves and then recede into the periphery. The radio mumbles.

Swift:  A word in your hand - incendiary device, enough to make my eyes burn, hurled and caught fast in my own. I want to drop it - quick! - let it slide through my fingers, fall to the ground between our feet. But you've always borne the truth, in your own way. So instead, I cling to it dumbly. After all, I've never mastered the dramatic flourish. I've always chattered redundantly when silence stung, left the party early with my aphasic tongue, traveled in shoulder seasons.

Rift:  A break in the numbing swell of the storm, in the hypnosis of sound. I want to rush into the lull, plunge my hot hands into the snowbank, hear the reassuring crunch of my own movement. I want the clarity of a single direction. But the barren limbs of the treetops begin to rattle again, the air gnaws at bare flesh and seeps under the door. Half-numb, I stand immobilized at the window and stare at the narrow streaks of a rabbit's footprints pressed into the powder.

Soon, it will all lift. 

- kc