It's so beautiful says the young girl to her mother, and mist from her breath creates an angel
on the clear cold glass of the window as they peer out and watch old man Ford across the street shoveling
snow that has collapsed from a wintry sky like a 10-story building falling in an earthquake, crumbling across his drive,
his avenue of escape for food, for an ambulance that came late one night when chest pains falsely alarmed, a faulty gallbladder he said,
but that was springtime, it's turned winter since, and his shovel sings a threnody with each scrape of its tongue against hardness,
and the pair that is watching from their window cannot see the pain on his face, cannot feel his struggle for breath,
cannot know his heart is getting ready to fail, and when they turn away from the window, old man Ford dies on his drive, embalmed in snow at ten below freezing.
W. Barrett Munn is a graduate of The Institute of Children’s Literature. His adult poetry has been published in San Antonio Review, Awakenings Review, Copperfield Review Quarterly, Sequoia Speaks, Book of Matches, and many others. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
