Short gasps at long months of winter, the wincing
pant pant pant that makes ferocious husbands
Curl little flecks - like paper treading through iron grates
And reaching the so-hot-it’s-cold-core.
Only knowing the awful wrongness
Of blue roses, and of ice-worms seeping into plump cheeks.
They crawl into his bones, lay blue-veined eggs, and
When they hatch, they don’t splinter or feast or explode.
They insinuate. They nestle.
They take little nibbles of a last glorious sunburst
Nursed in a breast that looks
Like the end of a subway tunnel:
The blistering, white-hot glimmer in the distance revealed
As nothing but sunlight blinking on the snow.