Which of the Four Seasons of The Year Appeals to You The Most? Why?

James Iredell
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If I could, I would make you winter all the time. The planet would spin, fixed at perihelion. Oh, the irony of our winter, when this orb of water and pines wobbles closest to the largest nuclear bomb we know.
But I would make you winter in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, specifically. I love you best with your pines snow-dusted, your crags smothered in a white velvet sheen. The river of your temper frozen and leading from the lake.
I would snowshoe across your empty meadows, scanning for fox and white- tail prints, like reverse Braille, imprinted words that tell a survival story. I would ski your KT-22, your Granite Chief. Your wind would chafe my cheeks, but each breath would take my breath away. Even on mountains physics breaks down.
Nights, we’d build a fire and snuggle under wool. The crackling chopped logs send a Christmas stink to the stars. We’d tip glasses of Cabernet careening into each other, colliding comets. Their blood would stain our lips. The cataclysm of our utterances would be so human we’d have to love then kill each other. These are metaphors.
I’d wonder: how can this linoleum grow so cold? Where do all the squirrels sleep? How many dogs can one neighborhood support?
The heater would clink on and accelerate like the roar of rocket engines. Your panties, on spin cycle, like the white outside, the pure creek and its trout. Not a single mosquito descends to birth an itch. I cradle you, hefted in my arms like granite. The whole world a massive boulder, snow-covered, mined from the depths of supernovae. We are nebulous, too. We spin together.

James Iredell lives in Atlanta. His fiction and poetry has appeared in Gigantic, Hobart, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. His nonfiction appears in Sleepingfish, The Collagist, Pear Noir! and is forthcoming in The Rumpus. He is the author of Prose. Poems. a Novel. and The Book of Freaks.