AUTHOR'S NOTE:

I wrote this during one of the Snowpocalypses of 09-10 (there were so many!) and we had been stuck in the house for days with our toddler son. We kept watching the news, to see what it was like in the area, and they kept reporting on families stranded on the interstate in their cars, families bedded down for the night in the local high school gymnasium of whatever exit on the highway they had been near. The nights were so quiet when it snowed that much, except for the scrape of the plows, and we had just decided our son was too old for the baby monitor, so we had packed it up. His breath went from being sound and light—the thing lit up like a Christmas tree when he’d snuffle or cough—to just sounds down the hall. And I’d look out at night through the window and over the snow, and everything that had been cast in orange when it snowed was shrouded in this cold blue light when it stopped. I never write short. I always write long poems. But I thought Cellpoems was such a neat project that I wrote this as a personal challenge just to send it to you guys.

BIO:

Erika Meitner is the author, most recently, of Ideal Cities (HarperCollins, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner. Her next book, Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls, is forthcoming from Anhinga Press in 2011. She is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she teaches in the MFA program.