POEM | Mark Smith-Soto
Old Man Winter February’s frozen rain drapes the backyard in its glistening spell, traps the mind in cold decades deep: Home again. I felt like dying, something not said: words to scatter crows over the fields. Might as well come late and bare-chested to the dinner table, might as well burp or chew with your mouth open, transgressions that got you slapped at six-thirty in the evening over the breaded veal cutlet and potato. Pop, you never said you hated winter, you admitted little. But now I feel it, as if the early fog reached through the window to hold us together, as we so seldom were, staring out at the hollies in their stricken glory.
38 | Raleigh Review
