What winter wants

Cold is the scoop of light thrown on a single woman’s pillowcase, the city sharp as the edge of thirteen tonight. She’s singing in the grass, long dead. Your grandmother. A girl. Thumbing your throat, down your pants, little hooks of larksong, sprouting. Here’s what you can’t imagine, what you can’t climb, no matter how small you fold at your ma’s insistence. The song repeats itself, folds into a strip mall moon, stretching above the roof. December. Gibbous new year, then the yawn of march. So much is holding me. In the white of this borrowed mind. So much yet to come.