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Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem

I’ve behaved poorly every winter
I can remember, my awfulness in each
separated only by degrees, 
secrets piled like snowdrifts at the corners 
of rooms I wouldn’t stay in. 

Hiding was easier.
I stuffed myself in the closet 
of our pit-city apartment—
walls infested with neighbors 
tiptoeing through roach powder 
caked like salt-circle prayers—
my sister above me, her small body 
throwing up what little warmth 
our family offered—a recipe of lemons 
and gelled mentholyptus to keep us quiet.
Her vomit running from the top bunk 
down to me smelled warm and too green. 
I had to get out of there. 

I disappeared 
because the air outside was too full 
of breaking—
vows shattering; locks snapping 
too loud for lungs that barely held. 
The familiar sound of domestic violence 
brings a comfort 
of knowing 
what’s next. 
Embracing the facts early and often
can help you put at least the length 
of a teddy bear’s arm 
between its sound and yourself.
 
Later, these winters of paying the cold
forward, before it reached me, translated:
stealing partners, and partners’ passwords,
eating nine boxes of pizza rolls to swallow 
my sexuality, never finding the end 
of a bottle, arguing against the brittle logic 
of my own survival—
because proving I mattered felt better
than knowing I might not.

But let me rewrite these winters:
I pull my sister from the bunk,
our laughter is what breaks open the dark,
we are cherry blossoms bursting 
through an imminent thaw, 
we lie in peace across our bedroom sheets, 
left to mature in a natural sun. 
We remake the closet into a fort,
walls drawn tighter not to trap us
but to keep us safe. 
My sister’s eyes aren’t buttons anymore, 
she isn’t puking synthetic cotton, 
I don’t use her small body as armor.

Outside, the snowlight waits,
soft as her hand in mine.
We step into the cold and make it ours,
reaching for the frostbitten branches
and claiming them as swords.
No harsh realities or words can follow here—
and if they try,
we let them land,
then split their heads like seeds in the muck,
each fracturing skull 
a shot at a promise of something 
that finally grows.
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