Chris Gilpin

Each Winter Every Winter


The house holds winter over its head

on a book, the covers its roof, and us,

the pages within. The book stillness

rising, a fat sky wedge plowing

upwards, as the snow rotates down,

a repeated background on vertical scroll.


Winter bringing yesterwinter,

piled onto by the winter before,

carrying the winter three winters ago

when our car crashed through the snowbank

coming out cleaner than it went in

to another winter, the coldest one

on record, echoing

a sneer of glaciers bejewelled by the sun.


Winter bringing futurewinter,

the one where the car crashed through the guide rail,

coming out grated like aluminium cheese in

to a stupid winter without snow,

on top of a science fiction winter,

nuclear, with books

burning, evangelicals dancing

round the conflagration, plutonium flurries

swirling at their feet.


Plus the winters unwritten, unrecorded, humming

like a bassline on the other side of a wall,

as the snowglobe recycles its fable,

winter upon winter, piling into memory,

each with the same light cold touch.

Chris Gilpin has won numerous accolades in the spoken word and slam communities including the 2011 Vancouver Individual Poetry Slam Championship. His work has been published in GeistPRISM internationalCV2Vancouver Review, and The Canadian Review of Literature in Performance. He is the Executive Director of Vancouver Poetry House.


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