Winter
My husband and I get divorced
every winter, driving over the mountains.
It’s like the joke about the chicken,
where the thing on the other side
is something worth getting to, only
the chicken is carrying the Talmud.
We’ll be fine, says my husband.
But it’s not us, I say,
that I’m worried about.
On the icy road we stop behind
a single-file line of cars.
While we wait, my son tiptoes to
the shoulder and pees. He is still so
young, the danger here does not
occur to him. The road is slick
under packed snow, dirty
and deceptive, the way it was
when I was young and boys
would take me out in cars
late on winter nights, crank
the wheels and slam the brakes
in empty 4-ways, spinning us
like tea cups at the county fair,
flesh into flesh, careening close
to tree trunks and telephone poles,
our tires leaving great, looping,
spirograph tracks we’d get out
and admire, howling like idiots
in the stale suburban night.
When we push north,
we pass the accident--
the van on its roof, the driver’s
side smashed in. The dull wail
of the ambulance coming down valley,
its sad song made soft by the snow.
My grandfather believed god chose him
to survive the Holocaust so he would father
a son. But I am my mother’s daughter
and I have no such hubris. I’m here
by dumb luck and despite this foolishness.
It’s the world outside
that’s impossible to control,
every damn molecule bonding
and breaking without telling you.
I trusted those boys the way I trust
my husband, his steady hands --
because I have to.
every winter, driving over the mountains.
It’s like the joke about the chicken,
where the thing on the other side
is something worth getting to, only
the chicken is carrying the Talmud.
We’ll be fine, says my husband.
But it’s not us, I say,
that I’m worried about.
On the icy road we stop behind
a single-file line of cars.
While we wait, my son tiptoes to
the shoulder and pees. He is still so
young, the danger here does not
occur to him. The road is slick
under packed snow, dirty
and deceptive, the way it was
when I was young and boys
would take me out in cars
late on winter nights, crank
the wheels and slam the brakes
in empty 4-ways, spinning us
like tea cups at the county fair,
flesh into flesh, careening close
to tree trunks and telephone poles,
our tires leaving great, looping,
spirograph tracks we’d get out
and admire, howling like idiots
in the stale suburban night.
When we push north,
we pass the accident--
the van on its roof, the driver’s
side smashed in. The dull wail
of the ambulance coming down valley,
its sad song made soft by the snow.
My grandfather believed god chose him
to survive the Holocaust so he would father
a son. But I am my mother’s daughter
and I have no such hubris. I’m here
by dumb luck and despite this foolishness.
It’s the world outside
that’s impossible to control,
every damn molecule bonding
and breaking without telling you.
I trusted those boys the way I trust
my husband, his steady hands --
because I have to.
Margot Kahn is the author of the biography Horses That Buck (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008) and co-editor of the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press/Hachette, 2017). Her essays, reviews and poems have appeared in Lenny Letter, The Rumpus, Tablet, The Los Angeles Review, River Teeth, Publishers Weekly, BUST, Crab Creek Review, Whiskey Island, Portland Review, Jabberwock Review and elsewhere. She lives in Seattle.
Winner of the 2019 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, that year's winning poem was selected by Jericho Brown, who had this to say:
""Winter" takes on the past through a speaker who reckons with the fact of powerlessness in the future. I love how this poem begins in what seems a domestic situation but ends in a way that explroes all of motherhood, womanhood, and loverhood."
Winner of the 2019 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize, that year's winning poem was selected by Jericho Brown, who had this to say:
""Winter" takes on the past through a speaker who reckons with the fact of powerlessness in the future. I love how this poem begins in what seems a domestic situation but ends in a way that explroes all of motherhood, womanhood, and loverhood."