Frozen Solid

w I n d swinging heavy with flakes winter's underbelly chilling fingers and toes on a Kyiv hill in wounded wisps of snow two small girls in boxy blue snowsuits share the plastic toboggan their push downward, a blur of swoosh delirious clarity through the rattle of a confining cage shell-twisted history's rupture training their thoughts past the gnawing void where houses once stood past boundaries where bricks and rubble end and something else begins sleighing outside of what blasts the city two young girls on a sled that flips in an unexpected direction falling accepted, detours accepted lopsided displacement childhood that wishes to outlast the falling familiar to those with crushed ribs like broken umbrella wings the fallout from a despot's bare-bones grin frozen solid like a glacier slipping itself into place where every face is full of things unseen Poem composed December 1/2022