February 29 - Hard Scrabble Photography

Smoke pours from an orange chimney in the middle of a field
[something like that song you played the day she died]
[you never told me where you got it, just that it was on your iPod]
A sanatized cloud of whatever we could find to keep this house warm
[you told me once that the reason we were loosing our rainforests was the fires of homes on the prairie]
[I told you that killing trees far away wasn't nearly as bad as burning the last potato from our mother's garden]

She rubs her hands together, cold because it never gets warm out here,
[she refused gloves, though they would have given her more hands more utility]
[was it something about mittens being different or]
[something about maintaining her uniqueness in an unbroken field of snow]
and takes pictures with bare hands of a thin film rainbow on our newly shoveled driveway
[father, you shouldn't have mocked her]
[by throwing her China Pencil in a bottle and calling it art]

She told me once - in a dream - that dying tasted metalic
but did not sparkle like she had been promised by Pastor Brown.

Charon still asks for money at the dock.