Birch bark is to
tinder as virgin
is to splendor.
Our animal selves,
our orange cat,
your silvering chin
pressing through my tinsel
-thin winter cheek
like a cranberry garland orb:
you, shearing
this month’s bristles:
me, tallying your skin’s pits
& wrinkles
‘til they might as well
equal mine and
—stop. You can’t giftwrap
what’s germinating
:holes
have always chinked
atomic armor: age
has never clocked in
in equal opportunity.
Just think of us as cyborgs,
imagine the lines for replacement
parts and the cost of labor
set at every
account’s rupture.
Reams of spruce needles
for the season of dying:
the festival of light
bulbs incandescent
asway in drops of frost.
Rachel Edelman grew up in Memphis, graduated from Amherst College in Massachusetts, and taught environmental education in Maine and Colorado before settling, for now, in Seattle. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fairy Tale Review, Day One, The Pinch, Southern Humanities Review, Typo, and other journals. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Washington, where she teaches creative writing.