Creative Corner: The Snow Angel

Creative+Corner%3A+The+Snow+Angel

The Snow Angel

The first word I spoke was grey as the cold snow sky, suspended, coiling in the frigid air like the dangling chain of skylarks outside my window. I was made to be white lace, a fragile paper valentine cut from winter’s nectar; the curves of my eyelashes were meant to catch snowflakes, my mouth was to be an iced cherry. Instead I adopted the crooked smile of a blizzard, and my parents soon learned to pluck chips of frost from the coarse curls of my hair, to file away the jagged edges of my cheekbones, to close the mirrors of my eyes until the shadows hid their piercing ferocity.

As I grew up, I pretended to fall in love with a world without color, to glisten beneath the pearl of a winter sun, to enjoy the feeling of snow spearing the soles of my feet. Spring rolled into a storm cloud in my gut as I watched the oaks beyond the doorstep birth a thousand green children, saw petunias sucking silver drops of rain onto their soft pink tongues, felt the tentative fingers of the first warm sunrise. Robins became my harbingers of death, and no matter how many times I screamed hot, red words at their beady eyes I would only bleed blue.

It was a Sunday when I took my first step into yielding soil, walking out to run my fingers over the plump sides of a growing mulberry. It broke apart, purple-black, undone by the chill of my palm. For a while I thought I was crying, but the wetness on my cheeks was merely my skin, slipping into puddles on the summer grass.

 

From SONGS OF ESTRANGED WOMEN

A Collection of Prose Poems