Once there was nothing sweeter than snow
Do you remember Penguin biscuits?
Their bright wrappers enveloping our first knowledge of flightlessness.
What are snow angels called when there is no snow?
Mud demons, grass ghosts, sand sprites.
Once there were fifty words for the kind of snow that could bury you.
Here is an ice-house crammed with imported ice from Norway
to clink in the whisky glasses of industrialists.
Today’s snow is a melting haiku.
Do you remember Fox’s glacier mints?
The logo a polar bear on a hunk of ice, confidently navigating his plastic horizon.
Miniscule flakes fall, trying to seed on thin soil.
Why do you complain there is not enough snow for ski-ing? It is not your biddable lap-dog.
Do you remember snowballs?
Chocolate shells dipped in coconut, filled with mallow soft and bright as toothpaste?
The snow shows us where the bodies are buried.
Look, his ice-pick is not even rusted.
Oh, his quaint and perfectly preserved shoes…
Do you remember ice pops?
How you could suck the fruity colour from the column of ice until your cheeks numbed?
How young we were to need so much cooling.
Snow is being driven underground.
A resistance cell is forming.
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow.
Sue Burge is a freelance writer, mentor and editor based in North Norfolk. Her most recent poetry collection is The Artificial Parisienne (Live Canon 2024). Her eco-angst collection, watch it slowly fade, is forthcoming with Yaffle Press.
And peace to men on earth
O little no of nerve-endings
how full we signs of teeth.
Away the day and dreamless thought
intrusive tinselled wreath.
Yet in this marriage sleeping
persistent clanging weight;
the paper strewn of love-worn years
are sodden sky tonight.
Precociousness of merry
and babbled sippy cold
while mortals tile the Sertraline
their strips of tepid pool.
O glitter bauble family
in secret overcast,
then bright eyes sing to ravaged was
and weeks to later first.
Erica Hesketh’s poems have appeared in The North, Magma and Under the Radar among others. Her debut collection, In the Lily Room, will be published by Nine Arches Press in May 2025.
Snow
It’s snowing again outside
and I’m trying not to think of you
or how our love wasn’t love
but something like ice
sharp, and cold,
and how it glimmered at the edges
how people looked at us and said,
Wow, that’s nice
not realising how much energy
it took to keep the set cold
and how much I had to ignore
the heat flaring off in the distance
calling me, telling me,
You are allowed to melt.
Max Wallis is the author of Polari Prize-shortlisted Modern Love (2011) and Everything Everything (2016). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rialto, Poetry Scotland, Fourteen Poems and Popshot Magazine. He was once Grindr’s poet-in-residence. Instagram: @maxwallis