Here you will not find a single dead
deer or opossum on the side of the road,
no corpse for you to learn a lesson from
no private exchange or public forgiveness.
In this poem, you will drive home
to the last place you felt safe.
Enter the house of your childhood
and hear the voices that gossip
about those who have not yet died,
the drunk neighbor who left you caramels
on the stairs or to the woman that
wore tight dresses and went on too many dates,
who eventually becomes your grandmother.
Maybe in this poem we will all fall in love
and drink to the beauty of women and to the health
of men. Maybe in this poem the snow will fall
on the streets and remain untouched. No bomb
will shatter the snow family you have shaped
with your hands and no siren will sound
from the speakers that line the town square.
In a different poem you are old enough to
intellectualize your sorrow, but in this poem
you are watching the snow fall and wondering
what time your father will be home. In a different poem
he never arrives and you wait in the cold
all night. In this poem your hands
are still warm despite your weapons, snow ball
in one palm and icicle in the other, ready
to defend a home that in this poem
doesn’t need defending.
When the long awaited taxi turns
onto your street you drop everything
and run as fast as you can toward
a memory that is shaped like your father.
There is no avalanche in this poem
only a snow globe whose cities
will survive no matter how many
careless hands have shaken them.
—Luisa Muradyan
Luisa Muradyan (Website, Bluesky) is originally from Odesa, Ukraine and is the author of I Make Jokes When I’m Devastated (SMU Bridwell Press, 2025), American Radiance (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), which won the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and When the World Stopped Touching (YesYes Books, 2027). She is a member of the Cheburashka Collective and holds a PhD in Poetry from the University of Houston. Additional work can be found at Best American Poetry, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, and The Sun, among others.