THE APPROACH What makes a winter? Is it a gain of snow on bough or lack of leaf on tree? The belief in summer to come or doubt in change as small as the greening of the grass? Should one approach cold with resignation to be of the cold to feel pain that knows only numbness as relief, to embrace discomfort in masochistic friendship? Or, with frantic fight instead make fire light, clap hands, bundle body in thick garments wrap around you blankets tight and soft with the promise of kinder times to come? Is bitter air a battle call to become an alchemist who, with shaking fist of will makes nature name you Master, transfiguring base and broken Matter into miracle cures? Or does the bite in your bones advise a time for stasis, hibernation even, in any case a relinquishment of responsibility and a ceding to what sojourns a mind may make in dreams?
DILEMMA There’s a tear in the curtain over there, you see it gaping and gawping at you so brazenly. There’s a tear in the curtain, should we peek through tattered fabric and find what may be found beyond? Our minds will surely be different when all this peeking is done, broadened in ways unpredictable. We may be given access to dark vistas, stretching in every direction, a blackness to shame night, perhaps, impenetrable and foreign somehow so terribly foreign as to make us flee from the curtain and abjure all tears that offer peeks. Or will we find light unearthly at first in majesty, pouring through hearts long world-weary, rejuvenating receding minds pulled inward on themselves like curled shells, first feeling they can safely unfurl, yet soon too bright, too bright to look at long and bear, so that wrong we will feel again to have ever gone peeking through tears. If we were really to look closely, after gathering all that tiresome courage, we would probably just spy a neighbor mowing his lawn, a practical person oblivious to people with peeking curtain dilemmas. And that would be the worst of all possibilities to glimpse only those things which are mundane Through so rare an event as a tear in the curtain.
THE DEAD COME IN It’s said the dead are lost to us, but my experience is they’re not; with rude reliability I find it’s the living always leaving, but the dead come in, and do not stop. The living often make dramatic exits, flee from fire escapes, drop to the ground, run down the street; their going brief as lightning streaks. Yet slowly, steadily the dead come in and will not stop. The dead relish revolving doors so, they’re always going in and out, in and out pressed against glass that’s straining, cracking, growing thin: they’re really always coming in, and never think to stop. Encountering those dead you knew alive is always awkward at best, for memory tested teeters off the brink, askew, like the sickening wink of a clown so, you fall down and they walk up, and barely recognized, they do not stop. Dead or simply gone away are both the same, being different ways to say “I’ll haunt you.” But I would give so much to find a secret rhyme you chant to make the living stay and the dead forever keep away. I lose the living, draw the dead and well I know that this is law, like the orbit of the Earth this circle mustn’t alter or unknot of how the dead eternally return to us. Yet, I’m begging, make it stop.
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M.H. Adelmann is a lifelong writer of poetry and prose based in Maryland. A musician, painter, and fiber artist, she takes odd jobs to support her passions while taking care of her demanding cat family. She studied English and Philosophy and is a voracious learner. She writes because she frankly cannot stop herself.