Jessica Goodfellow

Jessica Goodfellow's books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev's Mandala (2015) and The Insomniac's Weather Report (2014). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and Motionpoems. Winner of the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal, she's recently had poems in The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and Best American Poetry 2018

Winter Descending

We wake to winter's impasto of snow,
thick brumal brushstrokes on roads and fields.

Ice scumbles the brambles, the branches,
the fences, with all the verb tenses

suspended

between the gray sameness of sky and not-
sky: a grisaille aglaze in shadow and rime.

If the crisscrossing branches of frozen matchsticks,
the frieze beneath the low ceiling of clouds, was

upended

it might be a baseboard of verglas and vertigo,
and what we'd thought was the opaline sky

might be snowy ground, this picture of winter
hung upside down and, blizzard-dizzy, no one

suspected.