Winterhospital

the window is freezing into a lake

and nothing on its surface has vertebrae

I want my oily feathers back

the smell of tin-foil eyes

and catfish bones

underneath my skin, everything’s packed

and the day flakes like stream-caught salmon

underneath these ceilings, lysol gutters my dreams

turns to vodka powdered guilt

underneath this sheet

pick it up– the ice the mentholated everywhere

ruin it

make it go August-fast

Dawn Tefft’s poems have appeared in Witness, Fourteen Hills, Sentence, and Court Green, among other journals.

Photo by Flickr Creative Commons user David Breizh