In the rain’s inventory, a trace of an initial on the windowpane dark as blown pupils marks
your absence. Beyond the blight of frost and silence, a thicket, where your presence dwells,
scratches a tunnel into the subsoil. And, I, a drowned woman, launch a constellation past the sentry,
breaking bonfires into grasslands. And now the cold is a scepter I clutch in my teeth. A grief
I bite down on, knuckling its fanged organism with a marred collection box of membranes
dredged from old stories. December has no scent, its whitened landscape
is a far wall with iron bars that have been gnawed. I straddle this sadness, cut
its cloth into a tourniquet I wrap around the world’s nettled pulse, waiting
for junipers to transform into lamps following the anatomy of a sibyl whose hair
was drawn from the ink of ravens and whose jawline opens the hymnal of your farewell.
Olga Orozco’s Calendar of Snow by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White
