Adult Poetry - Third Place

It is winter again. Every year it comes with its hard-edged
mouth, turning this place to bone. It's been years since
I've been home and still, I can trace these streets from memory,

each one a vein – a backroad to another life. What is it about
this town that settles like frost across my collarbone, the air cold
enough to leave a scar. Nothing ever changes – not the barn

with her wide, red hips that mark the boundary of the last place
I lived. Not the grave of flat-chested fields, now littered in snow,
or the sky above it all – a blue-grey ghost, snagged on the barbed

wire fence. There is no arguing with winter here – this scarf whipped
to knots, my neck straining against the long, wet noose that pulls me
to the front door and across the gap-toothed porch, no longer white.

Like any threshold I step over, I make the sign of the cross on my cold
jeans until I hear my mother's voice, calling me. There is nothing as good
as the sound of my name in the mouth of this woman who waits for me.