Dear Suki: Great Smoky Mountains,
then the temperature started to drop,
dropping still as the earth felled away
from its repose and I, tipped the edge
of dark’s aerosol, rattling the weight
of contraltos of some distant rumbling
brook. This was when the ice-low wind
greased into me a theater of shadows
over dense cap moss, plucking spare
the marionette strings that had grown
pliant from my fingertips. Eyes tacked
to the crescent of gypsy fowls clawing
at the onion-skinned sky with manic
beaks, scaly-blacked and flagging with
acid storm of gangrene death. Casting
flights of a thousand microbes skyward
the host of snow fireflies, my legs flew
through mercury construct of Carolina
silverbells, arboreal as a scent traveled
ever so tangentially only to be smote by
my heart dripping red—drip, drip, drip.