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A hundred words for snow
The Hyacinth Review
The Hyacinth Review

A hundred words for snow

by
May 24, 2023
Snow, Gustave Courbet, 1874

Bleah B. Patterson (she/her) was born and raised in Texas.…

Like a crystal chandelier / smashed, broken, melted down / and poured out to become this sparkling / almost iridescent thing / the ice covered the lake as her / sister skidded across it clumsily / in her brother’s too-big-shoes, / not skates, those are a luxury / for white children on northeast coasts. // but this is the ’20s and this is Alaska / and the weather is brutal and produces / brutal people. // And then there’s the scream, not unfamiliar / not of the child who's fallen into / that starving ice, glass shards / like teeth swallowing / them whole like the tiny little fish / we eat at dinner / but the scream of the mothers and / the fishermen. // this time her mother’s scream / sounds just like all of the other / mother’s screams / and this fisherman is her father / who says the ice is a landmine / and he would know because he’s seen war / the ice is shrapnel / and he would know because he / lost his brother to it, // and her mother screams in a language / she’s not allowed to speak / and this time her father doesn’t / slap her hard across the face / with cold, hungry, icy hands, / this time he runs too, he understands / instinctively, without having to filter / the cries through this new language / his daughters bring home, / and they meet at the icy mouth / that chandelier lake where her sister was just / swallowed before she could even / let out a scream of her own. // but she is silent, she doesn’t move / she shifts back and forth on the / shoes her sister tied for her that morning / after her mother yelled at her / for trying to leave barefoot walking on the snow, / xAtl’ – because the Eskimos / have a word for snow in every / shape, every context / under every threat, / and maybe Eyaks do too / but by the time she’s old enough to wonder / she’ll only remember this one, / and she’ll only remember it was hungry. // And when she’s sixteen she’ll think of me / and when she’s sixteen she’ll think of me / before the birth of my grandmother / before meeting my great-grandfather— / an army man like her father who wooed / her before she was old enough to / drink the whiskey he’d drown in until / she finally divorced him— / she’d think of how no one should have to birth / seven children and watch six / of them die at the hands of the brutal cold. // She won’t be able to conceptualize a world / in which I have one clear word for snow, / don’t need many ways to describe it, warn against it / a thing I’ve never seen or touched or feared. // But she will realize it shortly before the dementia / swallows her, hungry, and she’ll realize that / no matter how far you run the world is hungry / for the lives of girls in one way or another / and she’ll wish I had the words for what I feared / the way her tribe must have had / — a hundred words for snow
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Bleah B. Patterson (she/her) was born and raised in Texas. Former evangelical, former homeschooler, former journalist, she believes in honoring every iteration of herself. She is a poet exploring generational and religious trauma, and a current MFA candidate at Sam Houston State University. Her work has been published in The Brazos River Review, The Texas Review, the tide rises, the tide falls, and The Bayou Review among others.

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