Snow
Rent from DeepDyve- Snow
It wasn't snowing, and then it was,like death, like my sister's textsthat just stopped: I'm in the hospitalthen a phone call: We did everythingwe could: endocarditis, valve leakage,her heart on heroin. She wasn't addicted
and then she was, on and off, for yearsher and her daughter, my niece, livingon the streets, every few weeks a phone call:we need a motel room, food. Once we ordered thema pizza from the other coast where we had movedto get away from them, though we couldn't
quite quit them, addicted to family, a feeling,a rush of guilt, the wrong address, we never knewwhere the pizza went. She was a statistic,one of the twelve-fold increase, they must havefolded her clothes, dropped them in a bagwith her purse, her phone, what little
she had left, though the women's shelterhad no record, though they had other bagsshe'd filled with nothing more than rags:a wealth of sweatpants, unraveled sweaters,a box of makeup and a toothless comb, pictureher grandchild had scribbled in with Magic Marker: [End Page 10] a parrot in a cage, its folded wings bled throughto the other side. I understand how it happened,but it doesn't matter, it was inevitable, unavoidable,if any one of us was going to fall prey it was her,middle child of too many to count, not enoughlove to go around. I was in New York, it was
snowing, Michael Moore was on stagein front of an American flag when the phonebuzzed, went to the stairwell where I was told,alone on the metal steps, She's gone, sobbingwhen a voice from a dark doorway askedAre you all right? a guard in his booth,
My sister died. He handed me a boxof Kleenex and closed the door, it seemed,to give me privacy. Back in the cab I satbetween my girlfriends, hip to hip,like sisters, an arm around each shoulder,all night we had been laughing and then
we weren't, they asked me questionsand then they stopped and we rode oninto the snow, powder, black tar, brownsugar, junk, scag, skunk, dragon, china white.Snow. Then the cabbie turned right and easedthrough a slew of pedestrians, a sea of coats
and gloves, wool scarves, faces hiddenbeneath hats, it was like the whole countrywas out on night patrol, trudging forwardstolidly, seriously, like we had to plow our waythrough it, keep our heads down, keep going. [End Page 11]
Dorianne Laux's most recent collections are The Book of Men, winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. She teaches poetry in the mfa Program at North Carolina State University and is founding faculty at Pacific University's Low Residency MFA Program. Only As The Day Is Long: New and Selected, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
