Lee Jaszlics is a technical writer and  photographer living in Portland, Oregon. They share their life with a cat, two pet spiders and a dissecting microscope. Their work has never before been published.

Out For the Season

Winter left you breathless; fine frozen talc wrote a foreign alphabet across organs with classical names, and branching reeds that no longer sing when your cracked lips draw in the air that will not come.

You moved like a textbook you were a free-body diagram where friction meant nothing metal sliding across ice digging in to open and push off curling across those knees that would never heal and all of the impossible ways to stretch and stop after stop after stop after

Got to have some skin in the game, and forty below is nothing nothing at all just the point of agreement between siblings who rub up at forty nine, dip a little south sometimes, meet up for shinny after school until winter eases away

Spring will thaw the hole in your chest; that tepid sluicing saltwater that keeps you from slipping too far, tangles you in net, anchors you like bare skin on raw metal like sweat on a frozen pond

and stubby willows fight through brown slush that traps the sun; nothing can remain ice