Medrawd

That ramshackle building looks over at us on the boardwalk, peasoup paint peeling, oxidized penny face staring back at the sea while the wind plays with its curtains, pushing and pulling the stained linen through the windows like pale fingers stretching for the taste of salt on an old and dusty tongue.

In winter I feel old: I turn as weathered and grey as the trees, my legs freeze in place, rooted here. I think about this as I pile  berries into a bowl. They're out of season, and I imagine them jetlagged as if that counts for their sagging skin. Someone pulled up their roots and now the snapping air ages them as much as December ages me. I know girls who sit outside in sweaters, waiting for spring, when the ground is soft enough for them to pull up their own roots and move on but I twist the berries into dough stand next to the trees in a colourless coat and as it gets colder my roots get deeper.

In the spring you can pull open the earth and scoop out bones with your hands. I am putting one back together. Here, this is the tail bone, and between my forefinger and thumb I clutch a femur in miniature. The jaw is almost perfectly intact and if you look at the molars you'll see it's probably a lemming. When it gets dark -- still early -- I put the bones back into glass bottles. Next winter I will bury these again, and next spring I will play god again.

chickadees hang on telephone wires by their feet. They sit next to old dangling sneakers. In the morning They wake me up, squealing like my phone when they see the sun. Filaments of red run through their chests. Have you held a bird? Their bodies warble. When the sun rises, even in watercolour winter, where everything is muted and half-asleep, I can feel the electrical current. It runs up my spine as I stand in the cold, swearing at birds throwing bread to them anyway, because when they sing their bodies shake with life.

this body is an orphanage. There are over 200 parentless bones in here. They cry for out -- I feel it building up under my sternum -- but anyone with a needle can sew up the spaces where more than skin shows through.

Just the same couple of kids, just the same jangly guitars while they nod their heads to the same band they listened to last night. Tonight is never different from last night, not even when the full moon rises like a poppy blossom. The moon is sickled tonight and the colour of honeysuckle. One kid drops off on the old leatherette couch. It's been in the dingy basement since anyone can remember. Probably belonged to someone's father's, before the kids got their hands on it. A couple of girls have fallen asleep on each other, bodies piled on a musty smelling blanket. The jangling of the guitar seems slower, or maybe that's just us. A girl I k

where the cold goes belly-up like a frightened dog, or a dog who trusts you, or both -- dogs can trust you to frighten them, I've learned, and they welcome it with the body language they borrowed from sheep -- is where the ice on the lake never quite forms but lays there on the surface of the lake like a sheet on the summer bed, slightly transparent and exposing the body underneath it like museum glass, and the kids go down to pray to the cold with chapped hands and they're all bundled in pea coats and their insides are kept warm by beer bottles but that's the only thing keeping those hearts thawed (they are kids, after all), and it's the sam

a fox hung over the shoulders, another clever man skinned in a sterile room. I suppose you wore plastic over all of you while you did this because who knows what illnesses and bugs are carried on the air you're sharing with this thing with a rusted back and curled, wrought iron fingers, more sickly than anything else. At the right angle they look like crumpled paper. Still, though, the head is good and intact, the eyes clear the same jaundice-hazel colour of your sister's. When everything is cleaned and gutted, when everything is properly prepared and touchable, you drape the fox-body over your body flexible shell wrapped around y

birds slung up a wire by the feet, sound - -less beaks pointed to the frost-hard ground like compasses, eyeballing north at around my toes, blue and still, frozen to the ground. I am anchored here. No loud blood-pumping; winter drains the ground of breath the way I did the birds, and back-bowed I'll carve them out, feathers falling to the ground like a heavy snow. They'll make a rusting mound soft, red clotted leaves on the frost-hard ground.

chalk hands pressed against the throat of something: calculations in white strings, like the bitter pith of a pomegranate, half-numbers half-skin. A heartbeat divisible by a hydrogen bond.