Page from a Seneca Falls Notebook

Late dusk, and a woman looks up
from a prayer book to follow nightbirds

she can’t identify. Through a window
growing cold to her touch, she watches

freezing rain slicken the dark into brightness.
Weather melts contours in the middle distance,

and her gaze turns glassy as if someone calls
to her out of a far-off year. 

From a road flanked with hemlock and cedar,
a pickup u-turns. Its high beams

brush a neighbor’s daughter
who’s run outside. Eyes closed,

her tongue tastes snow at the edge of the storm
that just now dusts the river.

A curtain ices over in a window
left open above her.

JC Alfier’s (they/them) most recent book of poetry, The Shadow Field, was published by Louisiana Literature Press (2020). Journal credits include Faultline, New York Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Penn Review, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review, and Vassar Review. They are also an artist doing collage and double-exposure work.