Boreas
January through March, one blizzard trod upon another’s heel, so fast they followed,
snow fortressing the drive. All that treacherous black ice.
She knew what was coming by the way he closed the front door.
We crept carefully through the cold rooms.
By the seed she scattered, cardinals gathered, males bright as blood drops, females
the color of flames going out.
While he drank, she stacked the wood, cleared the roof of its burdens.
Spring: the ground’s giving-in, fecundity’s reek mixed with decay.
Young as she was, the child believed the crocuses thrusting up through the earth
expressed a certain violence.
We basked in what sun he offered, one of us always partially in shadow.
What kind of man pits child against mother I ask you?
He, always basking in sun; she and I, apart, shadows. What did he offer?
A certain violence. The crocuses thrusting up… I was so young.
Decay mixed with the fecundity of Spring, her giving in, the reek of it.
Burdened, she cleared the roof and stacked the wood. He drank.
Flames went out. Blood dropped brightly. Cardinals gathered by the seed she’d scattered, males
and females.
The careful rooms we crept through, cold.
He closed the front door. What was coming? She knew.
Blizzard after blizzard that January through March. A fortress of snow and treachery.
Following you over the black ice, she and I trod upon one another. You drove us.
Elisabeth Adwin Edwards’s poems have appeared in The Tampa Review, CALYX, B O D Y Literature, Posit, and elsewhere; her prose has been published in HAD, CutBank, On The Seawall, and other journals. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, the Pushcart Prize, and Best New Poets. She has taught her popular online class, “Living Attentively: Journaling through Poetry and Observation”, through Grackle & Grackle Literary Enterprises. A native of Massachusetts, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and teen daughter in an apartment filled with books.
