I don’t mean to sound gone when I say,
“It is always spring.”
What I refer to is not the powder-smelling sole-pink peelings
from the skin of the winter that the children are made to clutch beneath their rain-hoods
much too early, getting drunk on the most unlikely of futures.
This – at least – is an illusion, as unlike snowflakes which are
worshipped by the same, these flowers are not unique, they are not new,
they have been up before, opened like serpents their jagged mouths to lap up a sun which,
some say, has already died.
Their souls, kept underground, look much like onions, curled so that the gods
cannot cut them; they unclench to laugh when they hear words like “beginning,”
when they feel above the tug of helpless hands just trying to get a scent of
the rubber of the world they will be forced to wear. And all this to say that, “Yes,
it is always spring,” because under a layer of dirt, skin, thought, time, there is one
small thing,
maybe a very bad thing,
that always says,
I am only this colour for a time, like a hand
turning grey under rings. And even then most of me
remains bone. Please don’t celebrate
this withering appendage, or us millions
scattered nowhere until May, we have
been found before
had our spines snapped to revive too many sapped or swollen souls;
there is nothing special, nothing new,
we are here because
there is nothing else to be,
just as there was nothing else in
February.

Stephanie Sushko is a writer living in Ontario, Canada. She is an English and Cultural Studies graduate student at McMaster University. She has won local awards for poetry and fiction, and has previously had work published in Literary Orphans, Ripples in Space, and Cleaning up Glitter journals, with upcoming work to be published in Poetry South and Slippery Elm. Website: https://stephaniesushko.wixsite.com/fictionandpoetry