[Poem] In Winter

In winter

By Katherine Hodge

I only know Chicago in the winter. The steel gray skies and wholesome car exhaust. The painful glare off the 12th resentful snowfall of the year, your muffled voice, frozen on my neck; don’t look too close at the slush, daughter. Don’t stand too close to the heater.

In Chicago, my tailbone ached from the diet of ice. Wailing hardwood was the only sign of life on the plains of our bricked-up city, the howl of wind out the back door a warning of the shove of your arms. Four hearts frozen in survival on the TV couch.

I once heard there was summer there, too. But I wouldn’t know. You shipped me off every year with a frown at the plastic innocence of my sunscreen; you were no expert on that easy sunshine. There was only the endless grid of infernal Chicago and you would bear it all, to make it fair. A perfect July saint of ice trapped at 5400 south.

But what choice did you have on those red murder mornings? We, too, were terrified of heat in our old, claustrophobic apartment; the one with the bullet hole in the window. He tended to wear ice cream suits and live awfully close. A Hyde who was too likely to roar and pop pop pop, maybe strip the paint with sunburned explosions. Perpetual and august.

So you stuffed ice into pantyhose and swept carefully around our empty dining room table. There was nothing else in the nylon with all its runs, but this endless, slow motion forward, away, back, away. You didn’t know how to set dinner for four, or three, or two, or one. And you never had. Not this mother. Not this sightless Madonna with those children drifting, back, away.

Too bad. It could have been a beautiful summer: jelly shoes, public pools, and a picnic for three (no one wanted four anymore). The long, blue lake, and tickling dandelions with a side of paletas. 

But our Chicago was a permanent winter, even in fall—those two hours—and that one dear, muddy spring. What a mess you were that spring. All that whispered yelling and shut eyes. And then the silence. 

Four hearts frozen in silence on the Great Plains.

Good thing I wasn’t alive.