About the Weather
What do I think about the weather? Ah, that’s a good question. Well, I think it’s untrue that no two snowflakes are the same, I think the snowflakes are just holding their hands in different positions, you know, high fives and peace signs and hitchhikers and fuck-you’s. Every winter I try to catch as many fuck-you’s on my tongue as I can, it’s the feminist in me.

I also think we make too many snowmen and too few snow women. If I’d seen more snow women growing up I might’ve learned how to flood a city every time someone told me to disappear. I might’ve learned how to load my smile into a sling shot whenever a dude said smiling was “something I should do.” You’re right man, here you go. Pew.

Where I come from it got so cold we made bonfires in the middle of the lake, there’d be this huge fire and we’d be skating around the truth that all of us, like the ice, would one day have to hold that much the impossible. Even my father said not to worry, he said heat rises but heat rises the same way people do. Because it has to. I think the heat would like to rest sometimes, don’t you?

My mother used to knit my mittens too big so they’d fit me when I grew. I’d wear them and I’d look like what I wasn’t yet. I feel that sometimes when I’m writing poems, like they don’t yet fit. You ever feel the best of you is something you’re still trying to grow into?

I don’t consider myself a cold person but there’s that windchill factor, I think I got it from my grandma. She’d sit in church and she would curse like a witch. You know witch hunts happen more commonly in cold weather because people look for scapegoats to blame for hardship? I know exactly who I’d burn for my own failed crop.

I used to fall too fast and love a lot. I used to make diamonds out of icicles and promise they would last. My father taught me how to make ice cream out of snow by adding milk and maple syrup, I’ve eaten more snow than anyone I know. I say that on a first date now, I say the storm is in me. I say “promise me you’ll leave me if your heating bill goes up.”

When my grandma died I went home and I made a snow angel on her grave and then I made another so she wouldn’t be alone. I’ve heard loneliness resonates in the same part of the brain as physical pain.

One year before Christmas I visited a men’s prison and when I was leaving the snow started falling on the barbed wire fence and I looked back to see that there were faces watching it from the windows but, there were no windows.

That was the same year 8,962 people in North Dakota laid down on their backs and made snow angels at the same time. If I had been there, I know I would have proposed to whoever was besides me, some angel with a smile all her own and the good sense to say “I don’t know, maybe..”

When my father was a kid he’d walk his sled to the top of a city in a snow storm and his friends would stand at each intersection below and my father would come flying down the middle of the road and his friends would stop traffic and holler “Go! Go! Go!”

But enough about me, what do you think about the weather? Do igloos blow your mind? You ever get your tongue stuck on something cold? You forgiven her yet?