In our palm

December stings my tongue as I spit syllables of

snowflakes into the air, we trudge

along shaven paths where leaves wilt, a withered bouquet

of once-velvet petals engraving vases

too elegant for dried souls.

The sky darkens into lapses of pitch-black, as snow pierces needles

into my feet, cicadas singing fill the gaps between my toes as you swallow

a snow globe, of white parkas on trees, their arms and fingers

gnarling the last leaf. You simply pry

from their weary hands, see the carcass between fate lines, crumpling

beneath blood of your boots. You wrench another,

footsteps scarring white until you have scorched

the amazon.

As Nature’s corpse suffocates in your barren palm,

decaying trees cascade into litters of rings

encircling trunks.

EDITORIAL PRAISE

This is a piece about ephemerality, about decay, about how death is so easy in the palm of a hand. Throughout the piece, there is a burning sense of destruction, of carnage, only to end on “of rings / encircling trunks” as if to suggest a hopeless, barren eternity. The reader is left almost speechless, watching the smoke rise and the ashes fall.