Boots, two pairs of socks, feet
cold to the bone. White sheers ruffling
at the window, register breathing softly.
Sun lifts the room into light.

I unzip the brogans, peel away
thermals like leaves from cornstalks—
extend bare toes to the pane,
poaching the warmth collected in glass.

My sister calls. And calls. In Indiana
the pack of snow is splotched, gray
with muck. It buries her sidewalk. Her busted
shovel can’t take the weight of wet snow. 

I buy teas, cat treats, pack a photo
of our mother stirring at a hot stove.
I wonder how to quell the chill,
deliver boxes of warm jellied toast,  

pry hope loose like windshield ice,
send her a morning with arms like sunlight.

Annette Sisson is Professor of English (Victorian Lit.) at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Recently, she is much taken with one of her earliest loves, writing poetry. Besides teaching and mentoring college students, she loves to travel, hike, bake, play piano, sing alto in choir, watch birds (but not officially “bird watch”), and hang with her family: two sons and a daughter, fully fledged, and her husband, a Communications professor at Belmont. In the last year, she has published 15 poems in 13 journals, including Nashville Review, Typishly, One, and a chapbook, A Casting Off (5/2019, Finishing Line). She was selected nationally to be a BOAAT Writing Fellow (2020), won The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize (2019), and received honorable mention in Passager’s national poetry contest (2019). Up ahead (five years?) she sees retirement beckoning; it looks like writing and family, sprinkled with house projects, music, travel, and adequate sleep.