by Naomi Anna Kimbell
Candling the shell between winter’s dark and winter’s snow, the sisters stand in a drift and imagine the children they never were. Neither of them moves. They do not flop onto their backs. They do not swish their arms and their legs. They do not make angels. Instead, they hover on the verge because in the making the making will end, and life will again be as it is, as it was. If only we’d been together as girls. However philosophical they sound after a glass of wine—what matters is that we have each other now—glee is short, too short, and life is a star made of ash and air. They touch mittens, as if they might hold hands, and remain in the anticipatory pose of imminent play so that play will always be ahead of them, like age, like infirmity, when one old lady says to the other, I’m thinking about that time when we made snow angels, leaving out the word almost, and they’ll remember it then as if done.
Naomi Anna Kimbell earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana in 2008. Her writing has been published in the Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, The Baltimore Review, The Indiana Review, Crazyhorse, Calyx, The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, and other journals and anthologies.
Emerge Literary Journal 