July 23, 2023
Eating Snow
Snow as particulate, as lattice netting
whatever is in the air, I have eaten you
when young, when my mother wasn’t looking
but inside, grumbling over dinner. I have stood
in the dusk when you have taken on blue tones
and shaped you to the size of an apple
without stem, and bitten. They say
there will have been soot from the wood stove
and dirt from the fields—both carried by wind, but
I saw neither, nor tasted anything
but you, pure as I thought you, dropping
in your leisurely way to meet me
in my tattered coat with the ratty fake fur
and boots that seeped along their sides.
Never too cold for this moment, you—this delicacy
that has become with each year, like everything,
a little more temporary.
___
by Kelly R. Samuels
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books, 2021) and three chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use, To Marie Antoinette, from and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, and Court Green. She lives in the Upper Midwest.