April 2024
Bio Note: My new poetry collection, Steady, is out from Dos Madres Press, and it includes my prize-winning poems, “Lady Bird” and “Being Ruth Asawa.” My Ethel Zine chapbooks—Surrealist Muse, Escaping Lee Miller, Frida, and Being Ruth Asawa—are for sale in the gift shop of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Smoke and Fog
On one side of the road
was ice and fog,
on the other, smoke and fire.
We were driving by the river
while the fire burned above us
a quarter-mile away.
Cool on the driver’s side,
and on the passenger’s,
the closed window glass
was hot to the touch.
Suffocating smoke
billowed into the air,
suffusing the atmosphere
like waterless blood.
The river was clogged
with floes of ice
melting in a sudden thaw.
Drawn out of the snowmelt,
a hazy fog hung low
over the water.
Above our heads,
above the roof of the car,
the smoke from the fire
met the fog off the ice.
The road took us
straight up the middle,
as if that were a choice
we were free to make.
©2024 Anne Whitehouse
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