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How I Know

By Lynda La Rocca

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

                                   — Sylvia Plath

How can it still be winter

when I’m melting to

a soup of cells,

a flick of eyelash, bits of bone,

one soggy slice of fingernail,

the stink of scorching fat,

a metal pot is jumping, rattling on the stove.

Outside the window is

a bear,

I smell its matted fur, 

rust-stained and wet,

it glistens, grunts, and snorts,

black snout, 

its nostrils flaring.

Great claws are shredding, gouging shutters, 

ripping, tearing off the wood—

yet these shape-shifters do not rise 

when all the ground is spread 

with crusted snow—

and this is how I know

the earth has turned,

the soft, round, secret bulbs

are pulsing, pushing, petaling 

in bursts

of yellow, scarlet, pink, 

a gash of green and purple.

Look now—

the cups are opening like mouths.