Brooklyn Snow

I wake early, as planned,
to be the first to set foot on the snow.
From the rooftop, I survey the city,
to see where the snow has touched,
the first, from my vantage point.

I step outside my building.
At first, no movement, no sound,
but the trees around are
heavy-laden with snow on their branches.
I hear soft puffs of it falling to the ground
and the crunch beneath my feet.

It’s only during the first snow
that I notice the muting of the everyday trappings,
the smell of fireplaces drifting from brownstones,
the flickering gas lamps lining the street.
There’s a strange freeness in this quiet,
a sense of traveling through time.

For a moment, I imagine the past,
but I know I wouldn’t belong there.
And so, I return to today,
exploring,
feeling like I’m the only one who lives here.

I walk down the avenue until I see the first person.
We lock eyes,
as though we are the first people
to discover this land.

I turn the corner,
and go home.

— Carrie Lipscomb

The Spider Web

Meeting you was like walking into a spider web,
Not as an insect or prey being trapped,
But as someone fully grown and wary of their path.

A few silks stretched across two branches,
Unseen and not yet formed into their full complexity.
We meet, and I feel the silks brush my face and arms.
Though gentle, I feared the creator of that web,
Where they had been, what they had planned to trap.

A frantic dance begins.
The silks vanish from my senses, and the spider reveals itself.
Small, it simply does what it knows.

Now, I no longer feel the web,
And I continue on my path.

— Carrie Lipscomb

Does the war child still dream?

No longer do they float through clouds and fields of poppy.
They flee the dissolving walls of their reality,
Glimmering futures, fragile as glass,
Shattered, damaged, and gone in an instant.
An endless fall, pulling them downward from the center of their chest.
Memories and terror remain, but the dream is lost.
A ravaged mind endures in the arms of Morpheus.

— Carrie Lipscomb