SEARCH PARTY, CALLED OFF

In the either of ether or ice

he became not himself but his body.

He froze or he fell—in the never

of knowing, we pitch our tents.

We dwell in the hinge of weather

and whether. In each tent hangs

his photograph, its own kind of ice.

Beneath it we sleep, or try to

while he lies in the ever of winter 

and vertigo. We dream the between 

of his fingers twined on a breath-

emptied chest in the plain pine casket 

we don’t have—the only of winterkill. 

Winnowed, we are—the wind 

in widdershins spin; the clock hiding

its souvenirs in a blue wound.

Jessica Goodfellow’s manuscript The Insomniac’s Weather Report, winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Prize, is available in a new edition from Isobar Press (2014). Mayapple Press will publish Mendeleev’s Mandala in 2015. Her work has appeared in the anthology Best New Poets 2006, as well as on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. A recipient of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, she lives in Japan.