Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Ice Storm” By Jaime Forsythe.

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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.

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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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