I know Colorado is trying. I really do. Every late February and March, he sets the alarm a little earlier and rolls out of his bed, with its down comforter patterned with sunflowers. He drinks the dark, but it’s decaffeinated, which makes Colorado slower than he has to be. And I am powerless. I want to give him some Ritalin to focus him on the necessity of stopping the snow and letting the daffodils grow.

But Colorado scratches his mud-belly and slushes the snow in his eyes and yawns some more snow over the mountains and sometimes goes right back to bed to dream about the ocean that covered him when he was a child.

Maybe he can’t help being lethargic. I get it. We’re all wired differently and maybe Colorado just has a slow metabolism.

I tell him if he’s going to create so much mud, then he could help me mop the floors. But instead he goes outside and covers the apple trees with frost, then builds a snow cave, lights the candle-sun, walks inside it and sleeps the melt away, while I pull burrs off the dogs’ fur, burrs that have thrived since October and have no intention of leaving. Colorado makes garlands out of them which he seems to treasure, drying them in the sun, crowning all pets and socks.

I wanted to go to therapy with him but Colorado said I just need to deal with my own anger issues and insistence to change him. He said true love requires patience. See, Colorado is pretty wise. But I will still curse a May snow storm and there’s just no way around it. He says to just chill, it’s not May yet. But I tell him, hey, it’s just a warning. Also, the apples really need to be given a chance this year. I want to make apple pie.

—Posted to poet’s Facebook page on 21 February 2021; appears here with her permission

Kika Dorsey

is a poet and fiction writer in Boulder, Colorado, and lives with her two children, husband, and pets. Her books include Beside Herself (Flutter Press, 2010) and three full-length collections: two from Word Tech Editions, Rust (2016) and Coming Up for Air (2018), and one from Pinyon Publishing, Occupied: Vienna is a Broken Man and Daughter of Hunger (2020). Her poems have been published in Freshwater, KYSO Flash, The Columbia Review, The Comstock Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and numerous other journals and books. Her writing has been nominated five times for the Pushcart Prize.

An instructor of English at Front Range Community College, Ms. Dorsey also works as a writing coach, editor, tutor, 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

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Bed of Ashes, prose poem by Kika Dorsey in KYSO Flash (Issue 10, Fall 2018)

⚡ Run Dry, poem from Occupied: Vienna Is a Broken Man, & Daughter of Vienna in Issue 5 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (October 2020)

⚡ Guest Post by Kika Dorsey about her latest book, in The Copperfield Review (21 October 2020)

⚡ The Quink of an Eye, prose poem in MacQ-5 (October 2020)

⚡ Hormonal, micro-fiction in MacQ’s debut issue (January 2020)

⚡ “My Belly Is Pregnant with Night”: A Micro-Review of Kika Dorsey’s Rust by Clare MacQueen in KYSO Flash (Issue 6, Fall 2016)