Real Snow

This time, the snowflakes are huge and flat,
plopping over cousin and cousin.
The white mask of the garden,
sidewalk and street

is thin as the sleeveless shirt’s warmth
worn on our first, real snow. We flutter
in the shivering mist, don’t slip despite

our untied tennis shoes plodding
snow-padded grass;
this cushion underneath soles,
we scoop with ungloved hands
and bring wet earth to our noses.

We waft the imagined smell of angel dust
unlike the children on television
who jut their airway strip tongues
for a morsel of heaven to settle.
This delight is all we ever wanted to feel.

Jorrell Watkins is an educator, writer, and martial artist from Richmond, VA. He is a 2020-21 Fulbright Grant Award recipient for Japan and an alum of Hampshire College and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He has received awards from the VQR Writer’s Conference and Echo Theater Company, and fellowships from the Association of University Centers on Disabilities and Smithsonian Institution.

Jorrell’s disability-inclusive play Meet us at the Horizon was produced by Combined Efforts Co. for its 2019 world premiere. His chapbook If Only the Sharks Would Bite was selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the inaugural Desert Pavilion Chapbook Series in Poetry. His poetry has been published by Obsidian, Diode Poetry, Juke Joint Magazine and others. Find him via @brothajorrell and http://www.jorrellwatkins.com