I wait for the winter like a wind-up bird, chattering its chipped porcelain wing—the music box croaks on for my finger still trembling, an intermittent sweet note gliding away like a fugitive tear. I crane my neck in vain against the days growing shorter, the nights deceptively embryonic—I swim in them. Eventually the water and I become one languid body, a vinaigrette left to sweat, a sad salad. We do alright, we do with the flies. One wing tip-dipped inward, this one never thought he’d come too close, that one never thought, head fully submerged in a bowl of subtle acid soup.

And then the ladle-eclipse, its gorge swooping beneath me, engulfing me in its inverted belly, my limbs gangly-dangling like lifeless antennae. Soon I am spooned onto a saucer and served to the Universe’s most pretentious dinner guests. Old Man Winter is the first to **** his pongs about my tender torso, and I am reminded of last season’s stinging and stabbing, though I manage to escape unscathed, however canned and stored in the crowded freezer. There I forget the Sun. I forget how to liberate my emotion, how energy can become a circuit of temperament. I am released when the Old Man retreats. I remember the post-circuit-breaking fear of being thought crazy, of the accuracy of those perceptions. I re-experience the cackling pleasure of moving against the grain. I learn how to harness and channel high frequency vibrations.

Flattened and sealed in the sardine can I healed. I grew in the dead of winter, I grew even when the goblin would meet my gaze in the mirror. I hear the ticking of the bird but now only in my left ear. I peer into the future and watch the bird fly away.