KATHY NELSON

Atmospheric River

 Today is the five hundredth day of winter.
It’s happening on the last day of March,
all at once like a siren at the firehouse,

or a ruined web of hair in the shower drain,
appearing where once water ran clear,
or a shadow of cracked tooth in an X-ray.

A drizzle of snow across inscrutable trunks,
a broken tree limb leaning like a crutch.
Everything strains toward symbol.

I went on trying to please my mother
in every mirror, every hallway. How safety 
resembles slavery. How the color 

of outrun grief is the weight of a snow-filled 
sky. In that sepulchral room I traveled
the seams of light from the window.

I matched her loneliness sigh for sigh 
and waited, arms folded, legs crossed, 
through the afternoon to be seen.

I have come to this—regret’s gaudy garlands 
are just another useless artifice, another ploy
against death. There is nothing, precisely, 

to tether worry to but these are days 
that demand precision. This far into March,
into endless winter, I have come to this.

Kathy Nelson, 2019 recipient of the James Dickey Prize (Five Points, A Journal of Literature and Art) and twice nominated for the Pushcart, is a graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. In addition to her two chapbooks, Cattails and Whose Names Have Slipped Away, and her full-length The Ledger of Mistakes, forthcoming from Terrapin Books, her work has appeared in The Cortland Review, LEON Literary Journal, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Tar River Poetry, Twelve Mile Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review and elsewhere.