circling her face
like bicycle wheels. Splintering
ice-chips clinging to her rose
lips. She’s wearing a frozen

smile, cold as the subway tile. Frost is
a glaze on the bathroom mirror. Her breath
billowing clouds. They're grey as
mother's hair under the chestnut wig that

she wears. The tears were once
a ****, colored as a Rubik cube from
globs of shimmering eye shadow. It's stained
glass, like the church windows from

father's funeral mass. In this prism touched
with autism everything done is rote. Everything
wrote is done. The hail’s blowing around like
juggling ***** of a circus clown.