I hope this holiday season finds you well and happy!

We have been less successful at thriving as Covid, which slithers over the roots we have laid in this godforsaken swamp. Actually, no water here and the earth in the West is parched, though the frozen rotten apples have been nourishing my geriatric dog so that he lies on the brown dog bed I never wash and farts and keeps us awake all night.

Sleep has become a horizon I have yet to reach and wrap around me with sugar plums and fairies, so I’ve decided on vodka instead. I can’t go to church because of Covid because no one wears masks there and so I’d probably die. So vodka is the holy water I cross myself with and sin.

Speaking of sin, my daughter, Sasha, is doing terrible because there are evil people in the world and one tried to rape her in a truck stop outside of Grand Junction, where she bought gas and corn chips. She kicked him in the balls. Her immune system is now shot from PTSD and she breaks out in psoriasis that maps her body to a hell of red flames, a hell that damn man deserved and not her. Because of therapy, she is coming to term with it and giving us daily reminders about what horrible parents we are.

Jasper, my son, agrees. It’s been wonderful, though, having him home for Christmas. He’s decided that soap is bad for the natural flora of his body, as well as any kind of shower. I’ve been collecting incense for when he’s around. I’m avoiding the rose one because it’s too strong. Sage incense is nice.

This year I applied to three jobs and got none of them. Our financial situation is a rock scree in a mud slide. Beneath us is a homeless encampment in our future. I just hope we can build a storage space beneath the bed for my scarves I bought visiting my mother. They remind me of her, and I grieve her death every day, and anyone who tells you that you can heal from grief has the emotional intelligence of lint.

We’ve had quite the adventures! In September we drove to California and in the middle of Utah, that shell that protects the wheel broke and rubbed against the tire. We had to cut it off with a serrated knife in Sasha’s picnic basket because we had no scissors. I felt like I had been a good Santa buying her that basket. We made it to Green River, Utah, and I bought a shot glass with a tree on it, though there were few trees in that desert. I filled it with my version of holy water and hoped we would make it to the ocean.

The mistletoe of my marriage was sold to defeat. I’ve finally accepted that my husband has a mind like a fog bank and a psyche of a fourteen-year-old child. He’s been doing well, and the copious pot plants in the basement have thrived with the water and lights that drive our energy bill up like an ascension of Jesus we look forward to in Easter.

In general, this merry Christmas finds us snuggled in our own manger avoiding Covid and the three kings have gifted us with global warming, new cocktails of psychotropic drugs, a pandemic, and military airstrikes. I do hope you and yours are doing well.

Sending you much love!
Happy Holidays!

Love,
Fran, Jim, Sasha, and Jasper

Kika Dorsey

is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, whose poems and stories have been published in Freshwater, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous other journals and books. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.

She is the author of three full-length collections, Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (Pinyon Publishing, 2020), winner of the Colorado Authors’ League Award for best poetry collection; Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), both from Word Tech Editions; and a chapbook, Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010).

Ms. Dorsey has a PhD in Comparative Literature, and she’s currently a lecturer in literature and creative writing at the University of Colorado. In addition, she works as a writing coach and ghostwriter. In her free time she swims miles in pools and runs and hikes in the open space of Colorado’s mountains and plains.

Author’s website: http://kikadorsey.com