by Kathleen Rooney
According to the original timeline, today is Tax Day.
Chicago wakes to a winter weather advisory. Whirligigs of water in solid form.
Like Prince told us, sometimes it snows in April.
An asteroid the size of a house will fly by Earth today, safely as the flakes fall beyond our windows. The astronomer in the video explained, “Space is pretty big.”
One of my spouse’s co-workers signed an email, “Hope Spring is eternal!”What is the spiritual purpose of snow? Frost on the pane suggests delicacy of feeling.
Some snow spackles down like lumps of plaster. But the snow of late spring has a rarified quality. Like Swans Down cake flour, made from soft winter wheat and sifted repeatedly to be finer than all-purpose.
Scientific study says that twenty minutes of nature significantly lowers stress. The snow in the twilight, a pale blue sugar.
Ukichiro Nakaya developed a crystal morphology diagram of the diversity of snowflakes. He also made the world’s first artificial snow.
The Sahara Desert was verdant at one time. Soon enough, the summer will be a swelter of melting ice pops. The globe a welter of melting ice caps.
How does snow feel about being slang for cocaine? Or a mass of static on a television screen? How does snow feel regarding snow jobs?
The birdbath with its disk of ice. Death with its ice-cold marble face. Death as phenomenon, death as concept.
What indignity to be a snowman. Peed on by dogs, head knocked off. Deliquescing.
We read “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” by Conrad Aiken in high school. “Miss Buell was saying ‘Land of perpetual snow’”—and before you know it, the protagonist has gone insane: “a secret screen of snow between himself and the world.” It gets classified as horror, but it sounds okay.
Snowbank, snowball, snowbird, snow-blind. A blizzard makes everybody look ambiguous, like angels.
O, heights of ecstasy! O, throes of despair! Emotion is not a state but a process. In that sense every person creates their own weather.
Snow me under. Wake me when it’s over. (But I know, I know. It’s never over.)
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Last updated February 23, 2023