Winter Storm Watch

by Karla Linn Merrifield

A snowflake falls,
dissolves on my left palm
forming an infinitesimal
lake halfway
between my life
line and love line.
I lick it, swallow,
see the cell it travels to:
one remaining ovum
preparing to release.

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A Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Everglades National Park Artist-in-Residence, Karla Linn Merrifield has had poetry appear in publications such as CALYX, Earth’s Daughters, Poetica, The Kerf, Negative Capability, Paper Street, and Blueline; online in The Centrifugal Eye, Terrain.org, Elsewhere: A Journal of the Literature of Place, and Elegant Thorn Review; and in several anthologies. In 2006, she edited THE DIRE ELEGIES: 59 Poets on Endangered Species of North America, from FootHills Publishing; in 2007, FootHills issued her Godwit: Poems of Canada. She is poetry editor of Sea Stories and poetry book reviewer for The Centrifugal Eye. She teaches writing part-time at SUNY College at Brockport.

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Back to Issue Two: Winter 2009