Forgetting February

    by Christine Klocek-Lim

This snow is not the snow I remember,

not like the year a blizzard carved a tube

of ice against the house like a giant wave.

We could barely stand on the curved edge

but you wanted a picture so we fell down

for nearly an hour trying to hold still,

laughing until our breath froze into icicles.

The morning your hands turned

blue I thought you were angry.

Why else dunk them in the dishwater,

flexing your fingers until the soap

turned violent? I hadn’t washed the forks.

You ignored me and later I forgot

your stiff fingers, their pallid nail-beds.

I didn’t realize you were sick until after

you were better, after the chemo dismembered

your immune system the way snow rips limbs

from weak trees. I forgot how I rewashed

the silverware after school that day, how winter

dumped more sleet against the house. I remember

the snow-wave collapsing before it disintegrated.

Today in the yard, the boys have built forts

from leaves and snow and I have hidden memories

from them: the door slamming over and over,

the sound of the wind crying against the house.

You told me childhood doesn’t need the burden

of torn branches strewn on the lawn like disabled fingers.

How then, does one forget that particular February

when every year the storms return, not astonishing,

not carving fantastic waves against the house?

© 2010 Christine Klocek-Lim

Christine Klocek-Lim received the 2009 Ellen La Forge Memorial Prize in poetry and was a finalist in Nimrod’s 2006 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She has two chapbooks: How to photograph the heart (The Lives You Touch Publications, November 2009) and The book of small treasures (Seven Kitchens Press, December 2009). Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, OCHO, Poets and Artists (O&S), The Pedestal Magazine, Terrain.org, the anthology Riffing on Strings: Creative Writing Inspired by String Theory, Touch: The Journal of Healing, and elsewhere. She is editor of Autumn Sky Poetry, serves on the Board of Directors for The Externalist—A Journal of Perspectives, and her website is www.novembersky.com.

Pat St. Pierre is a freelance writer and amateur photographer from Wilton, CT.  Her photos have been on the cover of Wee Ones Magazine, Pond Ripples, Shine Literary Journal Magazine, and Flutter Poetry Journal.  She has had children’s and adult nonfiction, fiction, and poetry published in a variety of places.  Her chapbook Reality of Life has been published by Foothills Publishing Co. and her chapbook Theater of Life is forthcoming in 2010 from Finishing Line Press.  You can read her blog at www.pstpierre.wordpress.com

December Snowfall © 2009 Pat St.Pierre