Winter, unmasked
By Andrea Ferrari Kristeller

 

bones closer to the surface,
visible, as if we turned transparent and

 

revealed knotted limbs roots
made snakes the stark brown beneath

 

it speaks in wild consonants of wind
killing any ornaments except if
red, like blood

 

with or without snow, conversations
hush as if any word would summon
(the unnamed)

 

we stay inside, run around in slippers, grow dishevelled, white
haired and in no mood for dyeing

 

yes, there’s fireplaces and soups, and
cakes on tables of checkered cloth. Frail spells

 

as all along it convinces us of despair.

 

While all along it holds its buds in secret like new candles,
smiling to itself

 

Resisting night

 

I don’t want the dark
with the golden still curling edges
cloud-coloured, bird-flocked
writing sky music of light

 

I don’t want the sublunary stillness
of cold erased edges
frail lamps fail to window-frame

 

like a child I refuse sunset, tease light to stay
with poems even if the moon is
large and gentle and motherly

 

I sit until I can no longer
fight this failure to distinguish
so many folded layers of beauty
set to rest in uniform black

 

I may go inside then, prepare a smell of soup,
deceive myself dreaming of dawn
in sheets of images, blurred
with forgetting

 

the relentless sinking of the light

while in silence stars speak to my resistance
arguing shine only comes when they
cross darkened paths

 

Andrea Ferrari Kristeller is an Argentinean teacher, writer and naturalist. She loves her teaching practice and the rainforest. Some of her poems have been published by The Avocet, The Dawntreader, Erbacce, ASEI Arts II anthology, “Flight of a Feather” anthology, Poetry Undressed, Braided Way, The Poppy Road Review, The Heimat Review, SweetSmell and Seaside Gothic. She participated in the Tupelo Press 30x30 challenge in July 2023. Her nouvelle “The Land without You” was given an Honourable mention at Writers of the Future contest (2018), as well as her short story “The Broken Sphere”, (2023). “The Ghost at the Whites’ Hoté” was published in the anthology Haus, by CultureCult Press (2022); “Her turning into a forest” by the magazine Globally Rooted (2023), and “The Ocelot” by Commuter Lit (2023). She published her first short-story collection of speculative fiction set in the Atlantic rainforest last June, “The Land without You and Other Stories”.