This poem is taken from PN Review 279, Volume 51 Number 1, September - October 2024.

Two Poems

Luke Allan
So heavy you couldn’t hear it

Snow. But in Iceland it liked to fall perfectly sideways.
Like the snow from a car boot sale, a bit broken but still okay.
Or like a river, but in the air, and it’s snow.

It wasn’t unusual to see a person walking backwards
through the snow to their home / future / surprise.
If that wasn’t heaven, nothing was.

Sometimes one stayed in shops longer than their
sales racks deserved, just waiting for a hole in the snow
big enough to walk home through.

Even the yellow grit bins in the street were somehow
full of snow. Little snow jokes. They were inappropriate.

At the petrol station my hand fell off, more or less,
feeding the car some combination of petrol and snow.

Sometimes the snow seemed to be the answer to a difficulty
further up in the sky.
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