The Channel Four Meteorologist Presages a Cold Front, Easing North
I am losing you and I feel it painfully now.
The different acquaintances, the distance
and empty texts. Worst of all is
I do not think it is affecting you
as much as me. You made your peace,
a blameless one, at that. But back
when I first moved to college, the night
it snowed and nobody was prepared,
while you were home and we could talk
without being stilted-that night I went out.
If my college was a beating heart,
then reamed down the middle
ran one street like a coronary artery,
and the first midnight it snowed, I walked
with two strangers down the white artery
devoid of cars. That bagel shop was still lit.
Its windows’ halogens tessellated
against the flurry, all the world a false
and muted color unseen by us before. Unfelt
except for in the wrongness of sleep. We walked
like ribbons across a sheet of black paper,
crossing, staggering, crossing again.
About the Author
Byron Xu is a Government and Classics undergraduate and Larry E. Temple Scholar at the University of Texas at Austin. His work has appeared in The Liberator Magazine and explores themes of doubt, neurodivergence, and theodicy.
