Thaw

The ice remembers its edge, how light bent through it like a broken promise. Now it forgets, dripping in the eaves, a patient arithmetic of loss.

Beneath the crust, something unnamed stirs in sleep—roots reaching blind toward what they cannot yet taste.

The air tastes different. Not warm. Not the absence of cold, but its whisper, its hand loosening around the throat. Above, the clouds move like uncertain memory.

We wait in this between, neither here nor arriving, the ground soft enough to break a heart, hard enough to bear its weight.