Linda Nunes, Snow
Blizzard (In the Diner)
Jayce Elliot
The birch grove bends her white limbs over predecessors.
Green young shimmer unbleached in the pale gusting squall,
swirling angelic din against the window. Like the tap, tap
tapping of glass at the bar, wood thuds beneath deadened ecstasies.
Spinning wrists, like a ringing of rims as bitter drink
goes up and back to pellucid lips, and the gulp, ahhh
of its landslide down, wrings out frostbitten throats
and warmed stomachs.
Dad faces me, across, stoic. His lip fain twitched,
maybe quivered. Lovely, weak idiosyncrasy.
Call his bluff, divest. “Lotta snow!” He smiled,
rusty teeth chewing words like stale gum. His words
blend the river of voices to a din like fast falling snow
on the window. “Well, gotta get back to work.”
Like the creak, crackling of the same red booths,
each white night they hold dead weight of misgivings.
Untouched plates bridge the distance between starved desire.
Time passes pieces of us, a distance stretched still,
and we try to close it with a midnight dinner
between parking lots.
“Gotta go push some more snow, ya know?”
I do. I know. Like the snow on the window.
Out I look, this I see. Not my father sitting long from me,
not the puff, puff puffing of pipes underneath
the flickering awning. Smoke swirls up, ceases to be.
Slowly, flakes are woven to gray. And through it,
a stillness will come, inevitably. The whistling bends
to the will of its settling. Out I look, sure to see the birches
bent white over unbroken green. The wind falls clean
from the night. And the stillness, still within me.
Jayce Elliot
The birch grove bends her white limbs over predecessors.
Green young shimmer unbleached in the pale gusting squall,
swirling angelic din against the window. Like the tap, tap
tapping of glass at the bar, wood thuds beneath deadened ecstasies.
Spinning wrists, like a ringing of rims as bitter drink
goes up and back to pellucid lips, and the gulp, ahhh
of its landslide down, wrings out frostbitten throats
and warmed stomachs.
Dad faces me, across, stoic. His lip fain twitched,
maybe quivered. Lovely, weak idiosyncrasy.
Call his bluff, divest. “Lotta snow!” He smiled,
rusty teeth chewing words like stale gum. His words
blend the river of voices to a din like fast falling snow
on the window. “Well, gotta get back to work.”
Like the creak, crackling of the same red booths,
each white night they hold dead weight of misgivings.
Untouched plates bridge the distance between starved desire.
Time passes pieces of us, a distance stretched still,
and we try to close it with a midnight dinner
between parking lots.
“Gotta go push some more snow, ya know?”
I do. I know. Like the snow on the window.
Out I look, this I see. Not my father sitting long from me,
not the puff, puff puffing of pipes underneath
the flickering awning. Smoke swirls up, ceases to be.
Slowly, flakes are woven to gray. And through it,
a stillness will come, inevitably. The whistling bends
to the will of its settling. Out I look, sure to see the birches
bent white over unbroken green. The wind falls clean
from the night. And the stillness, still within me.