Photo credit: C. Finch
by Maia Elsner
I sit in my Midwest apartment
amid another snowstorm
warning. A friend once said winter
is a time of preparation. I was
crying. The abrupt sting of thinly
chopped onions blurring white
the jagged undersides of branches.
Watch for the swellings, she said,
all those knobbles before the burst,
the blood-streaked magnolia, &
who are we not to notice? In the city
my grandfather fled, there is war
again. There were other borders
then & names for dandelions wetly
opening. I add turmeric, a gust
of sungold. Outside the crystalline
night turns to slip ice ground, slays
what buds of cautious hope,
leaves behind a hemorrhaging.
***
Maia Elsner is the author of the poetry collection, Overrun by Wild Boars (flipped eye, 2021), which won the Somerset Maugham Award and of the art book, Dante Elsner (Guillemot Press, 2023) which in its unpublished form won the Hopwood Award in Non-Fiction. This poem was inspired by the Ann Arbor winter at a time when Maia was writing a series of ekphrastic poems about her grandfather’s paintings.
***
This is an original poem, brought to you by Poet Tree Town, an Ann Arbor-based poetry-in-public initiative and celebration of local Washtenaw poets. Find out more about Poet Tree Town on Instagram and Facebook, or say hello at [email protected].
