GARCIA, NICOLE CARUSO

BEFRIENDED

 

Winter: cindery and wick-soot smudged,

each day had grayed along. Yet, at dawn          

a blizzard came, and still it dazzles dusk,

the skies so snow-bright they confuse the moon.

Just when each day had seemed a starker solstice,

frostwork wrought with feathery, icy ferns

has saved my windowpane from nakedness.

 

At my desk, a beeswax candle burns;

yet as it spills the scent of honeycomb,                     

each crenellation like a golden sun,

the tiny bonfire gingery with flame,

it’s neither winter, nor am I alone,

befriended by one bee who’s come to hover,

whose wing-beats fan the redolence of summer.

 

Nicole Caruso Garcia’s poetry is forthcoming in The Raintown Review and has appeared in Frogpond, Willow Review, Soundings East, The Ledge, the anthology Mother is a Verb, and elsewhere. She received the Spring 2010 Willow Review Award. She lives in Connecticut, where she teaches literature and creative writing at Trumbull High School. If you liked her poem in this issue, you can seek her out in editions of the online journals Mezzo Cammin, Antiphon, and The HyperTexts.