We’d like to thank everyone who entered our first poetry contest! Writers were asked to create a poem based around the word cold. We loved reading all of your creative submissions! And as always, it was a hard decision, but we are happy to announce our winner, G. N. Boorse! Congratulations! Your entry really captured the spirit of the word.
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Cold
By G. N. Boorse
they tell me that cold is the absence of heat,
but I do not believe them:
this presence of winter swoops in
like a blue and icy hawk
and sets in my bones like a cancer.
oh, arctic fire!
resourceful and clever,
slipping through the cracks
in every scarf and muffler,
reaching narrow tendrils through the air.
I wonder: is this the black and icy night?
or the onset of Parkinson’s?
for I cannot keep still.
how the wind moves me,
bites me, gnaws at flesh like
a hungry polar wolf,
a member of the pack,
hunting humans down
in their igloos.
zero degrees—and dropping:
I panic, and the
snapping, glistening wolf-teeth close around my neck.
blood runs in purple streams.
icicles, like daggers, pierce my heart,
and the pack of breezes swirls.
there is nowhere to hide from Jack Frost—
he no longer nips my nose,
he tears it off with frozen jaws.
I crave the warm fire
(visceral desire of early man!),
but it is nowhere to be seen,
lost, perhaps, in the snow
like a lonely, forlorn child.
blizzards rage, and I cry out,
but my tears freeze.
the air roars in my ears
like a Siberian tiger,
but there is silence else
on the hollow tundra.
I know that heat is the absence of cold:
and the cold is present, everywhere.
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