Tuesday poem #380 : K.B. Thors : Usually Referring To Chicken

You dreamt again about snow

drifts in small doses and spoonfuls

of sugar, the collection of trolls,

toy-naked and pot-bellied,

we left in the sun too long.

I’m picking scabs in a city park,

tracing sun spots and picturing

the corral, our smaller selves

suckling tunnels of ice forts,

burning our tongues together.

Even from here, every time

someone confuses freeze with thaw,

I see fumes rise from the scruff of you—

the highest hackle I never tasted.

K.B. Thors [photo credit: Layla Billey Thordarson] is the author of Vulgar Mechanics (Coach House Books) and translator of Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir’s Stormwarning, nominated for the 2019 PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation and winner of the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize. She is also the Spanish-English translator of Soledad Marambio’s Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else. She currently serves as Translation Editor for Newfound: A Journal of Art & Place, and is the 2020 CBC/QWF Montréal Writer in Residence.

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan