Red,
Just outside Denver’s this yellow stretch of nothing wherein warning signs read,
It is Winter in America.
It is Winter in America where canary yellows freeze to white, or where memories fall to freeze like stones for throwing,
And we write you this from a hotel bathtub under hazardous conditions. It’s negative three degrees in Denver, Red, and one month since the attempted insurrection, and from this sill whereon lemon waters freeze we see back, like way back, like back into the window frost of our little life with you on Ogden Street.
When we call the front desk they send up flowers and shadows of our sister. To everything there is a season, she says, and time’s a little dot.
A time for forgiveness, she says, dot.
A time for remembering, she says, dot.
And a time to refrain.
She reaches in bearing more lemons, bearing poems so fragile they break each time we drop them, and though her eyes are still our same green when she whispers,
We’re gone, Red, we left her. Gone like into the white wet clarity of Dolly’s eyes last April, or like into funeral flowers freezing, or like into that snow melt on the mountaintop above where our brother—we left him.
They say April was the cruelest month, but what of all this? Where are we now, Red? What is Winter?
We expect no shelter from fallen trees, man, and from frozen stones no sound of water. But pastors still preach to imaginary congregations, and love cannot live on Zoom alone, and we don’t even know who to throw the stones at anymore.
All we know is something like a flower within us froze, Red. So perhaps there’s some small hope for it all to melt again. But what is Spring, even? Do you even remember?
It is Winter in America, Red. And until the thaw, this is our goodbye.
Dyl
loved this & you <3