Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2017  Vol. 16 No. 1
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back VI KHI NAO

How Long Have You Been Sleeping, Snow?

How long have you been sleeping, Snow?
In that white sparking consciousness of yours
If your sleep is champagne
Mine is whiskey on ice
Shadow buries its tongue on shadow
Our lives are burning backward + forward
Obtuse tongue says, Hello Everybody.
I am a weaker form of deformity, says one dying snowflake
As it descends the stairless octave of earth
I have given birth to a dismal landscape
My army of sleeping men
Swollen by Carpathian crystalline
Your cloud my granular
My hail your pellets of warmth
Your lake my evaporation
Your smell extratropical
My windward your equivalent
You sublimate
You castigate
Your downslope love
My freezing solar
And it’s spring again
Layer by layer
While you glaciate
+ while I slowly move backward into your mouth.  


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