1
Loneliness moves by stab
and creak over winter hills—
crossbite of straps,
cunning hoops with teeth.
Snowshoes re-float the body,
distribute its burden.
Wood or aluminum,
baskets-and-poles,
be our wings. Our boats.
Surrogate bones.
2
Fences run with the hills.
Springtails pepper the snow
beneath spruce. A skitter of mice
in whiskery lines, the strut
and splay of a wild turkey.
Beneath my flat blue shadow
and deeper down, the memory
of other soles mingling
with fossils—today,
only practice not sinking.
Laurie Klein is the author of Where the Sky Opens (Poeima Poetry Series) and a chapbook, Bodies of Water, Bodies of Flesh (Owl Creek). Her work has appeared in Ascent, Barrow Street, New Letters, Relief, Saint Katherine Review, The Southern Review, Windhover, and elsewhere.