EASTERN IOWA REVIEW
  • Home
    • About Us
    • Masthead
    • Port Yonder Press >
      • Chapbooks
    • Eastern Iowa Review
  • Guidelines
  • Current Issue
    • Issue 14 >
      • Those Elves - Origin Story
    • Issue 15 - Love
  • Past Issues
    • Lyric Essay Issues >
      • The Lyric Essay
      • Issue 10 - Spring 2020
      • Issue 8 - Spring 2019
      • Issue 7 - Print Anthology
      • Issue 6 - 2018
      • Issue 3 - 2017 >
        • Editors Note - Issue 3
      • Issue 2 - 2016
      • Issue 1 - 2015
    • Themed Issues >
      • Issue 4 Contributors & Samples
      • Issue 5 - The SmartApocalypse
      • All Things Anne - Issue 9
      • Issue 11 - Hope in Renewal (An Intermission)
      • Issue 12 - Water
      • Issue 13 - Winter
  • 3 Sisters Awards
    • The Christine Prose Poetry Award
    • Dory Ann Fiction Award
    • Maggie Nonfiction Award
  • More
    • The Prose Poem
    • Fictions >
      • Contemporary Mystery
      • Dark Fiction
      • Debut Fiction
      • Fan Fiction
      • Honorable Mentions
      • Literary Fiction
      • Mythical Fiction
      • Speculative Fiction
      • Woods-Western-Mountain-Appalachian
      • Young Author
      • Unclassifiable
    • Prizes
    • Interviews
    • List of Contributors
PROSE POETRY​

COLLEEN MICHAELS


THE SNOW EXPLAINS ITS FALLING TO YOU


Because I could see your incantation as breath on the solarium pane. I heard the pen across white-lined paper as morning vespers, summoned. Because I want you to have some inheritance. It is hard to look up, in these abscess tooth days, this floor of sawdust, our shuffle and squall never melting together as a deep, clear reservoir. Because I am called a scattering, a dusting, Nor’easter, a blanket, a front, a force. I am offering you dance steps for silent pond ice, my choreography for disappearing acts desperate to stay. Because cold and desolate are the accumulating version of my story as told by the stranded in an airport terminal. I’m asking you to take me in at the back of your collar as an exclamation and speak my name like a child would. I am a collective noun. I am a congress. And I will fall as I will fall.


Picture

​Colleen Michaels
directs the Writing Studio at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she hosts The Improbable Places Poetry Tour bringing poetry to unlikely places like tattoo parlors, laundromats, and swimming pools. Yes, in the swimming pool.
Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Barrelhouse, The Paterson Literary Review, Mom Egg Review and Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace (Lost Horse Press). Her poems have been commissioned as installations by The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, The Peabody Essex Museum, and The Trustees of Reservations.

All rights reserved.
© 2012-2021, Port Yonder Press LLC
6332 - 33rd Avenue Drive, Shellsburg IA
www.PortYonderPress.com