On Speaking Ice
Homeland Security officials have urged disaster response staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency to avoid using the word “ice” in public messaging about the massive winter storm barreling toward much of the United States… (CNN)
What is winter
but pain brought by
absence: cold is a kind
of mystery, it tangles
touch with a simple
subtraction
of heat, the day
breaking like skin in the frozen
belly of a car
on the side of the road. I read
ten people froze to death
in my city, two fallen en route
to a market, eight more
at an intersection
of a hospital, ice
in their cheeks, hair, lips as if
they said goodbye
to a lover, traces of touch
still numbed like a memory
of violence. Fields, lawns, rooftops
erased in an instant, white
on white snow against which
anyone is darkened
to a cinder, so visible in the bright
eye of a storm. I read of
armies in American cities.
Where is Minneapolis? I can see nothing
But the great terrible oak tree darkening with winter
Even daytime is a wound.
The moon, the color of ice,
dangles as if
on a dark thread
in a hallway
the walls of which
are night
Ice seizes my kitchen window
like the mouth of a shark
as if to sever
flesh from lungs; it is
cold: the whole
emptiness of its sharp-bladed
insistence on force, the narrow, purposeful
and naked pain of what goes missing
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Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multiethnic U.S. literature at Indiana University, South Bend, and the author of Dedication (Partisan Press, 2011), Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (University of Michigan Press, 2016) and Citizens of the Whole World: Anti-Zionism and the Cultures of the U.S. Jewish Left (Verso 2025). He lives in Chicago.
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William D. Hicks is a writer who lives in Chicago by himself (any offers?). Contrary to popular belief, he is not related to the famous comedian Bill Hicks (though he’s just as funny in his own right). Hicks will someday publish his memoirs, but most likely they will be about Bill Hicks’ life. His poetry has appeared in Outburst Magazine, The Legendary, Horizon Magazine, Breadcrumb Sins, Inwood Indiana Literary Magazine, The Short Humour Site (UK), The Four Cornered Universe, Save the Last Stall for Me and Mosaic. His art appears in The Legendary and as cover art in Anti-Poetry and Sketch.
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