Advent I can no longer tell the hour in constant darkness. Is it night or morning, or a week later, a gathering snowstorm? I hear a thin whistle of a red bird as it flies into the crabapple’s crown, twitching like a tiny flare, its carol, a lesson in light. I take no energy or spirit, other than the weight of clouds, lifting this shroud— my lungs burning in winter’s incessant cold. The news, the terrible news arrives in threes: a text, a call to call back— a result. Still, I wake to gauzy gray light— this ragged woolly essence— something fuzzy, or is it scratchy? Something, still mine. Nothing Is What It Seems Today, beneath the crab apple, I found a red feather lying near puddles and loose stones, like a tiny flame, it dazzled briefly in noon’s chilly over- cast—this flicker of the past—my desire to be lasting—my cheeks flushed with the feather’s certainty, readying to take flight. M.J. Iuppa is
Like the title says.