The Compulsive Ruminates in Spring Snow

By Chel Campbell

Old snow turns me feral, I’m through, don’t tell me to get cozy when I live

in a land encrusted with icy oil and dirt. I am turning 31 next week, what a silly number,

though I admire its nerve of only being divisible by one and itself. I take myself out

to lunch, overhear a stranger tell a friend she bought 60 bucks of art supplies that

sit in a corner untouched, how she wishes Jerry was better about things, and such

needing brings her to tears. Hey stranger, I wanna tell you Jerry needs to step the fuck up

or you step the fuck out, unbury your watercolors, eat and drink and paint naked all day

if that’s what you want, but I am silent as I finish my soup (understand that I’m always

braver in my head) tip cash, and return to the concrete lot. Even the sky is mush, but

at least my belly is warm, my brain wrapped in the kind of wool scarf that tickles

the neck. Thoughts itch, divide themselves, seek temporary relief as my fingers

stop on the car door handle, knuckles split and bleeding, slush seeping through

cracks in my well-worn boots, my inner evils melting into temporary calm,

for they, too, only exist in my head. Say I open that door. Say I begin to thaw.

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Chel Campbell (she/they) is a poet from Sioux Falls, South Dakota whose work appears in trampset, HORNS, Pidgeonholes, Midway Journal, The MacGuffin, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. In 2021, she completed her master's degree in English at the University of South Dakota where she taught literature and composition and read poetry for the South Dakota Review. They have been a stay-at-home parent since the pandemic began.

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