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Susan Mitchell

Snowover

To stomp through drifts of snow and listen
for the crunch, crisp and swote.

Like biting into an apple with our feet.

How wonderful to spend day after day in a train
of snow, a whole car just for you and me.

How wonderful not to feel compelled to think
of a better word than wonderful.

To search the Internet for the crunch 
and creak of someone walking through snow.

Cranch if we lived in the seventeenth century.

Snow falling on yards of junk, on rusting
engines and factories.

On huge roots that could push up a city.

What a joy to say quinquangular and stretch
my mouth around your mouth.

To teeter the ridges between quartz and hunch.
To prolong the crunch and say backstitch 
and eldritch, hotchpotch and crouch.  

What is it like to be a root 
sucking up rain, dirt, and snow falling
without purpose or goal?

Penetrating into the oldest covenants.
Lapping the blood of billions.

Is there laughter in the hereafter?

Do you envy the rat its tail 
with over two hundred scales?

What a whiff of snow rushes the headphones.

Oh, honeybunch, if I met you in my sleep
would we lapspoon the possible?

Would we push up a whole city with our
radicles and burls?

How close are we to the edge
where the same answers are asked over and over?

Snowover and out. Snowover and out.

from NER 39.4 (2018)

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Cover art by Ralph Lazar

Volume 41, Number 4

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Writer’s Notebook

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

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