Snow

by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

“It was snowing/ and it was going to snow”
Wallace Stevens

The late cold slips in
at toe-level where
the door isn’t quite
flush, more cold behind
and rain, becoming
snow that unpacks the
sweaters that have lost
a button or have
sprung an elbow hole
or grown a matted
fake fur collar, those
ones destined for Good-
will, but not quite yet
since an April chill
surprised us and we
have to make do in
the house with one bed-
room in the cellar,
its back wall built in-
to the hillside where
a now-lost son slept,
like a stored turnip,
under an up-high
window rimed with frost
while we played music
all day as if those
flatted fifth notes could
ward off the snow that
was coming, the snow
that we knew would come.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of five chapbooks and four books. Her third and fourth books, The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, New Orleans, LA ) and On the Way to the Promised Land Zoo (Cyberwit.com), were published in 2019. Her work is widely available in print and online. Ralph Almeida is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and creates in Brooklyn, NY.