Fallen across one another,
the bodies of these trees
tangle in a mass grave.
What is left behind
lies broken on cracked dirt,
thin trunks and branches
bleaching in the unfamiliar sun.

Here and there a few,
too young and spindly
to be of use, still stand,
their sparse leafed crowns
no longer woven into canopy,
no longer holding birds.

Farther up the hill, blackened trunks 
the rancher burned stand guard
like tombstones, while the wind
scatters ashes across soil
so dead that even its insects
have abandoned it.

Pick your way through this boneyard.  
Feel the dead limbs snap
beneath your weight; see how some of them 
are shaped like animals 
we will never meet.

I’m hiding in the cloakroom off kindergarten in PS 21,
that old elementary school still standing on the asphalt
playground of my memory. 

I'm inhaling the scent of wet wool in this cozy cave
at the back of the room. I have closed the sliding doors
with their pebbled glass panes, and I’m counting the

brass hooks that hold our wet jackets and snow-pants,
staring at the scuffed linoleum floor where some
snow-beaded wool mittens have fallen to drift atop

the tumble of black galoshes, the old-fashioned kind
with two pair of latches that snap shut, closing the
pleated runnels down their fronts, with a satisfying lock.

On this chilly night of early winter when all of us kids
have been home a long time—and some are long asleep,
I am back in this musty cloakroom, trying to find which

boots are mine and wanting to climb again into my
snowsuit, zip it up all by myself, then snuggle into
a corner, feeling warm and safe in the familiar dark.