Winter Poems
Ars Poetica
(Dog Walking in Winter)
By Jefferson Navicky
The snow stays thick this year. Out in the forest, it’s still three or four feet deep. The packed-down trails are like foot-and-a-half wide tightropes above the ground. One wrong step sends you down.
The dog and I walk these trails, playing a delicate game of catch up and step aside to let her hurdling form pass along the narrow berm. Sometimes she bounces off my calves and plows herself into the deep snow.
And sometimes she finds a stick—more of a small branch—three times wider than the path. I look back and see her, proudly sporting the stick in her mouth. She barrels towards me. I used to try to stop her, wave my arms, yell at her, try to reason: don’t you know, it won’t work, the path’s too narrow! These days, as winter’s teeth hold on, I simply bend my knees like a hockey goalie, arms out, palms up. I purse my lips and prepare for impact.
Precaria
By Erin Covey-Smith
I don’t understand—they just keep growing all through these darkest months.
The aloe climbing out of its clay pot sprouting four new pups from sandy soil.
The inch plant, inert and withered for years, suddenly brimming and cascading silvery heliotropic tendrils.
The dried up husk of amaryllis bulb forgotten on the windowsill is putting out a cleaved pair
of curious shoots, and the dracaena has achieved twice its original height, celebrating its feat
in a shocked tuft of pointed leaves. The little orchid that sensibly dropped its petals in the fall has come around
with five full-faced flowers all blinking out the window above the kitchen sink. Not to mention the schefflera
straining for the living room’s vaulted ceiling, or both philodendra, undaunted in their reach and weave
across bookcases, window casings, walls. I am so tired. And the peace lily in the corner keeps unfurling
her generous white prayer hands over and over again.
