"Hold onto your snowboots in Ithaca today, baby!"
- "Hold onto your snowboots in Ithaca today, baby!"
Last night Dad emailed me my city's next-day forecast.I wake early to the skullcap of snow he's knit the lamppost.He's rubbed our sun raw with steel wool cloudand placed the back of his handagainst my windshield veined and tendinous with frost.
"You'll get 2 inches at least!" he wrote, meteorologistwho can see every city's tempestcoming, their weather's every dark mood, snow-
melt and moonset, can copy and pastemy zip code's every wind gustthrough every Lexapro'd wind chime excepthis own. His radar looks only out. Notin, where his own winter is long and most- ly downhill. Black ice. Snowbanks. A bockety, bald-tired past. [End Page 154]
Alex Chertok has poems published in The Kenyon Review Online, The Missouri Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Best New Poets 2016, among others, and essays on his prison teaching published in Ploughshares and forthcoming from Alaska Quarterly Review. He was runner-up in the North American Review's 2019, and finalist in the 2021 James Hearst Poetry Prize, as well as finalists in the 2020 Third Coast Poetry Contest and 2021 Tupelo Quarterly Poetry Open Prize. He currently teaches through the Cornell Prison Education Program.
