Today's poem is by Katie Prince

language in which slabb is the worst kind of snow
       

my cousin points to a sentence, says try
to translate this. I do not understand

the way the nouns decline. in my new
language there are fifty-six words

for wind, more than a hundred for snow.
as humans we are bound, noosed

by weather systems. by the indomitable
cold. in the old calendar Iceland has six

months of vetur. we sleep, drink glögg
through the dark, trudge through the slabb

that comes with vor and signals warmth.
my language is a thawing season.

at night I watch myself come unglued—molting
a former self into crackling grass. my skin

flakes into a landscape the dead-yellow
of summer, the red of desert clay. in dreams

I am haunted by Ísland, by gray, by lava
fields that are never as hot against my feet

as I need them to be. where the rain drives
black-eyed and sharp—an eclipse in horizontal

sheets. this, my mara, my slush-slick streets.
all stick, all dirt, all treacherous ís.

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Copyright © 2024 Katie Prince All rights reserved
from Tell This to the Universe
YesYes Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission