by Laura Stott
The question is, are they the messy-cake-in-your-face type?
Why else do we have traditions? … food fights.
This is a tradition.
She says, Fun.
He is green-eyed, cute smile … No blue eyes,
and as they are often of us oblivious,
Great kissing lips.
He says,
She is fun, cute. Not just in she’s cute,
but she’s cute. The way she is,
is cute.
When I was on the other side of the world, and I kept hearing Katie’s name-
my best friend, my brother,
also said in the light of it,
the way color escapes us,
She is so beautiful.
Like a poet said, “I don’t love you exactly.
I love you inexactly.”
You see-love
is like the snow.
How when it falls like that,
heavy and thick and yet
you’ve never
experienced anything that light before.
And it gets into your eyes,
it sort of soaks up your hair and you can’t do anything about it.
It comes in horizontally if you try an umbrella in the snow.
Never try umbrellas in the snow.
And if you stop all at once
and just listen.
You can’t hear anything.
Snow silences.
You think you can hear it hit, thousands at a time on your hands,
on your wool clothing
and the earth.
Love. It’s like the way the great
lakes and peaks alone crash into
each other.
The way you can’t tell where mountains end and clouds begin.
Spence and Katie watch clouds and sunsets together. She said yes
in the light of one and the color escapes them.
Like the moment right before you begin to laugh,
like the way you like to laugh together.
This is a tradition.
Love is snow.
And branches break from
the weight of it.
And color escapes it somehow and lights its
way into the sky and when you walk under pines
perhaps
you can just feel that:
The weight of cold temperature.
And a poet said, “It was like that and after that, it was still like that, only, all the rime. ”
Laura Stott is an English major from Draper, Utah. Her career aspirations include an MFA and mountains. She has also appeared in Quarterly West and Touchstones. Recently, she almost caught on fire working on her welding sculpture.