Our Own Patois

Patois for snow means pines covered, needles bunched
like fur hats. My thighs have a different language

for cross country skiing through the snow field, and anyway
Mom and I whisk from the lodge over the entire stretch—

no traffic, no deer, even the ravens have obeyed rules
of hiding, season of naming their young months ago.

Our memory depends on birds who make sure
the snow pack, just right, depends on clear sky.

At the lodge, stacked bunk beds tuck under the earth,
where the building cuts in at an angle, not caring

how the Sierras formed. With my father and brother we pitch in
for meal prep or dish washing, box checked when complete.

My mother refuses to live by another’s rules, and alone in the snow,
she has decided on this route, where we proceed in silver, kissed

with sparkles. Then a moment later she sets her sights
on the warming hut, a kind of solution to a problem

I don’t know, has lasted an hour, where we might be carried
out of this world. The cold. We find the door, push

with all our muscle, find logs ready to be lit, sit facing
the stone hearth, for giants. We pull out our lunch bags,

tuna for her and PBJ for me, and golden apples. She turns
away from me. I can’t see her face. She turns the water bottle lid

and we look at each other in surprise at the soundlessness.
Years later, without her, I have no choice but to trace

the patterns she set, so when I find the Sierra Club brochure,
open the well-creased thick paper and it tears, I read

about the land beyond the lodge, hope that by taking a red pen
and drawing the path through the empty field

to mimic the plough of our skis, I’ll find our patois.

Laurel Benjamin is a San Francisco Bay Area native, where she invented a secret language with her brother. She has work forthcoming or published in Lily Poetry Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Sky Island Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, and Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down: An Anthology of Women’s Poetry, among others. Affiliated with the Bay Area Women’s Poetry Salon and Ekphrastic Writers, she holds an MFA from Mills College. She is a reader for Common Ground Review and has featured in the Lily Poetry Review Salon. She was nominated for Best of the Net by Flapper Press in 2022.