PulpLit.net

Snowdrifter

The god of heavy duty machinery
Has parted the white sea,
Leaving a clumsy path
For my exodus from the train.

I am a sweating mummy with poor posture
Roving through sludgy tire tracks
Playing a game of chutes and ladders
With myself and musing as to whether Mercury
would have been swift still
Contending with such snow.

A clever entrepreneur has tacked his business card
Onto car windows peeking through grainy white cocoons

"I?ll dig your car out for $10 an hour" says the sign.

How much to dig me out of
This morass of self-doubt no longer mitigated by good report cards

This vacuum of McJob misery that taxes my spirit much more than my paycheck
This spiraling credit card debt that will bar me from ever running for public office?

I pass one car packed tightly into the drift
As though it were hovering behind its own snowfort.
I peek through one of its forbidding windows
To see a fearsome red security device
Clamped to the steering wheel.
Sprayed by the residue of my own footsteps,
a ridiculous pathos overcomes me.
I thank the God of Mercy
For the reminder that my entrapment
Is far less than that soulless vehicle
Immobilized from the inside out.

I soldier on, pondering how this evening hour
Once seemed so late to me
As a child winding down to the night music of bubble baths running

Whereas this resplendent hour
Speaking its wisdom quietly through the
crystalline vestiges of snowplows
Is my nativity.

Kendra Stanton graduated with a degree in political journalism from Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. She currently lives in Boston, MA and works for the city's Centers for Youth and Family Services.