“Moves of Little Consequence Ending with a Groundhog” by Thom Ward

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Etcetera's MistressThere’s the cold that manifests and there’s the cold
we blast at others because we can. One by one
these flakes, confused paratroopers behind enemy lines,
strike the windows, the roof, cling to branches.
Zealous believers drive their vessels into precarious
waters, know the fury of the hunt, as elsewhere
sudden squalls begin inside the agnostic’s head.
If you stay out too long in the snow, your hands
will get icesolated, our five-year-old says, just
in case we forget. I follow bleached rivulets of toothpaste
down the drain, another trail of exhausted ideas.
Woodchuck, please forgive small reckonings we run
through. Sun, shadow, shadow, sun—the white cloak
of the asinine each year gets dumped on you.

–Thom Ward,
Etcetera’s Mistress
Accents Publishing

More from Etcetera’s Mistress and Thom Ward:

Thom WardThom Ward is sole proprietor of Thom Ward’s Poetry Editing and Proofreading Services. Ward’s poetry collections include Small Boat with Oars of Different Size (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000) and Various Orbits (Carnegie Mellon, 2004). Ward’s poetry chapbook, Tumblekid, winner of the 1998 Devil’s Millhopper poetry contest, was published by the University of South Carolina-Aiken in 2000. His collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in 2007. Ward teaches creative writing workshops at high schools and colleges around the country, tutors individual poetry students, and edits poetry manuscripts. He is a faculty and advisory board member at Wilkes University’s Graduate Creative Writing program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Thom Ward lives in western New York with his girlfriend Jennifer and their cat Phantom.

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