PAUL CHRISTENSEN

I keep falling off a cliff while sitting in my reading chair. I turn on the TV and there's another giant upheaval of reality, and off I go into free fall. I'm growing used to seeing my feet dangle over my head as the snow-gray cliffs slide ominously upward as if heaven were building an upside-down skyscraper. I turn on the radio in the morning while sipping my first cup of coffee, and the Roundtable panel on WAMC informs me that Trump couldn't spell coronavirus in a tweet, an

Scraps of filthy snow litter the pastures around here. In town, the snow has turned dark brown, even black in places, after being shoveled up against a tree or along the curbs. Forlorn remnants of a powerful snowstorm of a week ago, and looking now as lonely as a bridal gown someone had ripped up and thrown down from an apartment window. It makes you feel desolate to look at these heaps of ice that refuse to melt. They hang around like nagging thoughts. I'm told more snow may

Here goes nothing, says the sun, as the sky buries it under a cemetery of clouds. I weep for the memory of spring, as if it were my mother, who died on an operating table after refusing to have her heart torn open by a rib cracker. She'll always be my principal hero in matters of stark reality. I hold her hand sometimes when I sit in the corner of my living room and ponder my own existence. I am frail, a balsa wood model airplane my brother helped me to glue together one sogg