Close the Window
I am not cold, I am hungry,
but the high wind is not blowing
anymore.
It is crawling toward me with the darkest
sincerity.
I cannot look light in
its face,
and it refuses to look at me, but the
smell
of cotton hangs in the air and I am
pretending
I know what it means to be
poor
when all I can do is count my
blessings
like raw soap shavings whittled off a
bar.
They fall at my feet and I consider
in all honesty
licking them to know the taste of
someone
else and bad language. A
punishment.
When I can’t do anything else, I can do
that.
And I can’t. Do anything
else.
Except that.
April Salzano teaches college writing in
Pennsylvania and is working on her first (several) poetry collections and an
autobiographical work on raising a child with Autsim. Her work has appeared in
Poetry Salzburg, Pyrokinection, Convergence, Ascent Aspiration, Deadsnakes,
The Rainbow Rose and other online and print journals and is forthcoming in
Inclement, Poetry Quarterly and Bluestem.
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