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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.

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