First Snow

14 | ARIA ABER First Snow Aria Aber poetry How easy for snow to turn to ice, for snow to disappear the light from the ragged frame of chestnut trees around the warehouse by what’s left of wild chicory, scraped sculptures, weeping dogbane. Hunger borders this land, while snow turns all to immigrants, snow salts the embankment, where turtles wash ashore, literally hundreds of them, frozen hard like grenades of tear gas thrown across a barbwire fence. But who of their free will would ever want to climb that fence to live here, who would pray each night for grace, hoping to pass through the darkened veil of shit, to bear witness to smokestacks, wild champion, knapweed? Who’d loiter around cricks glistening with oil, which, once gone, will, like death, at last, democratize us all? On potato sacks in the snowcapped, abandoned warehouse, there huddle and sit the soiled refugees, bereft, cow-eyed, ARIA ABER | 15 picking dirt o≠ their scalps, their shelled soles. Among them, wordless, is my mother, and nestled on her lap is I, in love with the light of the first snow of my life, so awed and doubtful still of what lengths the frost wills to go, and what shape it will then take— ...