NB: Looks like the second half of the Jim’s Fall cycle might be revving up…

When the ambulance
came for her she was lying
on the blue marble
and no one could remember
her name, but her face was so
cold it seemed right to name her
Icy and when she woke and responded to it
people called it a miracle but
they did not realize that the whole reason
she nearly died in the first place
was because she’d never had a name
before that seemed right —

Sondra Jane, Lazy Eliza, Lifting Belly,
Poppycock, Loveduck, That Bitch
From Down The Hall —

there are such things as stopgap names
and when Icy was first called Icy
she didn’t need to bother with them any further.

Her first breath upon waking was a needle fog
and her second was a dusting
and the third buried everyone around her
in white.

She left the hospital
walking on the tops of snowdrifts
and was comfortable at last,
light on the mind as a lost penny,
rolling the word in her mouth like a cube,
letting it slip loose and almost fall from her
but drawing it back in in time:

Icy, she thought. I am
that. I am
the name I grew into after all the
summers of disregard, and the beauty of the name is
that nothing can gain purchase upon me
until I choose to soften.