they're emerald green
they're icicles that drip

but only in the mind

the title of the work
Green Ice

meant to suggest
frozen glassy daggers
dead of winter

and the color green

but location is everything

hanging on what otherwise would've been bare

in a lonely room
where through the plate glass window
is the dead of night

with lights twinkling
like strewn cheesy emeralds

and the mind
now rudderless drifts far and away
to my bubblegum years

in the car
sitting in the backseat

on a cross country road trip
over his shoulder

I'm seeing a glossy green cover
with a comely pair of legs
all tangled up in fish nets and garters

sandwiched in between
the front and the back
rough and sand-papery

purple but steamy prose

and then
I'm weighted maybe anchored
to a question

how could something
so abstract
evoke an image so concrete

where purity
and lurid collide
to make a perfect storm

© Whit Howland 2019