i haven't said what i meant in a while. the floorboard heating sounds like a boy climbing a chain-link fence, getting his foot stuck in it, shaking. everything else is humming, check the weather for a third time before changing. stand on the back steps in a nightgown— shrouded in night: i face february. its insistence on the sun hiding behind the clouds: the skin on my legs is already dry and chapped. even if hidden, it finds its way there. all i can think of is the lack of sentiment, the solitude, my vocabulary failing me as the winter biting, rising hairs on my arms, one by one erect in the face of the kiss of a chilling, whistling wind.