“Ice Storm” By Jaime Forsythe
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ice Storm” By Jaime Forsythe.
Ice Storm
By Jaime Forsythe
On our last day of isolation, we wake to branches
dipped in glass, backlit by pearled sky. Windows
that fogged with our fevers now clear
in the powerless house, chain of X’s garlanding
the squares of an endangered species calendar.
Electrical lines spiked with icicles like the knife-
edged pennants of a deserted car lot where
a rippling tube man swears in neon: No Credit No
Problem! By the time dusk begins to gulp
the sun’s frosted glimmer, I’m as substantial
as an inflatable stick figure, fumbling with matches,
fine-tuning the head lamp’s eye so the eldest can read
Garfield. He’s asked about the tents blooming
along the drive to the university where I worked
and then didn’t. I admitted we have enough,
more than plenty in this world to extend a wide
circumference of warmth, yet the outside cracks
as limbs snap and fall from the weight of their glazed
enclosures. I turn the deadbolt, spread peanut butter
by candlelight and saw off the crusts. The toddler bites
but thankfully only me, my forearms purpled with wounds
iridescent as the insides of seashells. I’ve been asked
gently, Is there a word he could replace the biting with?,
gone blank. He got sick first, the hot plate
of his forehead fairly glowing beneath
damp cowlick until the heat expanded to hold
all of us and we moved through it like a low-
pressure system. In the coming days, the melt
will gather momentum, its drip a tireless,
untraceable knock I’ll answer
even knowing it’s no one.
Copyright © Jaime Forsythe
Jaime Forsythe is the author of the poetry collections I Heard Something (Anvil Press) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press). A third collection is forthcoming in 2026 with Wolsak & Wynn. Her poetry and fiction have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in EVENT, The Ampersand Review, Grain, and The Malahat Review. She lives in Halifax/Kjipuktuk.
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