PROSE POETRY​

COLLEEN MICHAELS

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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.

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​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.

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