Taylor Cornelius

Brooklyn, February

Salt on the sidewalk to sop up the pitted ice makes your dog’s paws raw,
and she’s up all night licking the pink skin between. You look up mind eraser

and find several ways to make a simple cocktail. When you add the soda, ice floats belly up
around the straw, bubbles a polar bilge in your chest. 

You start to see in snow-terms. The snow and not-snow of the streets
on the way to the subway. Reams of surgical masks and a solemn apology 

on the intercom mitigate added delays. The gift of delaying
keeps on delaying. Still, you’re impressed by

Manhattan’s glitzed-out mega plows. All the way down Avenue of the Americas snow is crushed
into tectonic mounds. These peaks absorb exhaust until they are obscene Pepsi slush.

At home, you obsess over the machinations of poetics, and pour out a drink. You lose track of the
ways you blotted things out to fix your syntax and ease your ache. Your dog is dreaming again, 

twitching in a rabbit chase, black mouth aquiver with mumbled yips. She’s soft as a loaf, and she
imagines her feet thundering cool as grass in some other, endless summer.

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Taylor Cornelius is a poet, artist and writer from Denver, Colorado. Her recent work is published or forthcoming in Poets.org, The Spectacle and Leavings. Taylor is a recent graduate of New York University’s MFA program in poetry and was named a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship finalist in 2022. She currently works as a freelance writer and lives in Brooklyn.