My Affair With a Frost Flower State of Affairs

There’s a beguiling danger in beauty… seduced as I was by the fickle fingers of fate musingly stroking my hair, I envisaged this lusciously lavish landscape of sun-raptured heavenly hills and valid valleys to be a lush, plush place for me to land ~ alas, such deception my naive perception did offer. Buried beneath the facade of a fertile dream-come-true and a mesmerizing mirage of natural light and zephyrus breaths - where your thoughts hugged the horizons of my mind like clouds on the edges of prairie dog skies and where your stampeding passions trampled my inhibitions - were delicate bandeaux of ice; finespun and feathery like polar gossamer that formed on the stems of your ruptured dreams that then became my nightmare when you had your hard freeze while warm sap still flowed through your veins, pumped and pushing through your broken being and freezing on contact with the chilled clime cocooning me, in a sudden silken surge of your glazing gauze holding me, in the vivid wild magic of your frosted crystallized clutches - fossilizing me, in icy opalescent ribbons of ornate whorls. Unable to escape the grasping glacial petals of your exquisite pain, your frost flowers plunged me into the frigid heart of your bitter bluestem’s prairie winter... There’s a beguiling beauty in danger hypnotized and hijacked as I was by the rhythmic sways of your tall grass ways - your flickering tongue tasting my air as my emotions were extorted till I was bled white - obviously oblivious that I was being preyed upon by a stealthy force of nature motivated by indigenous instincts. Susan Ashley March 13, 2018 ~ First Place ~ Premiere Contest: Poetry for the Sake of Poetry Sponsor: John Lawless *bluestem: tall grass native to the Great Plains with bluish leaf sheaths* *frost flower: thin layers of ice extruded from long-stemmed plants in autumn or early winter. These thin ice layers form dainty ‘ribbons’ or ‘petals’*