2023 Fred & Edith Herman Memorial Prize

wintering in america

by Mishal Imaan Syed

$At the solstice, December pulls in its wings. The hemisphere holds its breath, wraps its boughs in ribbon. I nest in the children’s section of the county’s only bookstore, my exhales framed in milk-white filaments on the windowpane. Ambient hunger clings to the land, pulls my eyes from the veil of ice that slicks the road to the toddler curled between books, cheeks aflame with cold —a life, just one, in emergence. She wears my sister’s face. She turns the pages with ragged hands, not yet understanding the curious mechanics of paper and ink. Outside, sparrows burst radiant from the hedgerow. Snowflakes shiver in descent, and one settles its spider’s body on the glass, trembling before it blurs. Through the static I hear the toddler still reciting her C’s. I ache for the first snow that lit the city after we tumbled like hailstones from the airline—my sister and I— together we saw Liberty’s torch garlanded in white. Together we watched the cardinals, blood-rapt against the naked trees. Together we read aloud from pop-up Alice in Wonderland until her house of cards came down and the Queen of Hearts fluttered at half-mast like a severed angel wing. The dark always fell too soon. My sister asked for a red coat and mittens— new ones. Still she patched up Alice with clear tape and gave the book to another girl, whose mother was never home. See—we build libraries wherever our words catch the light. Time bends around us, wool-soft, and I find myself here, in my county’s only bookstore— where the toddler’s nose burns pink between the alphabet, and her skin grows silvered in the fading winter, and the pines sigh into green hibernation— and my sister is twelve at our kitchen table, cutting paper snowflakes, then sinking them through the hearth and watching them curl to ash, their fractal wings swallowed by firelight.$

back to University & College Poetry Prizes

2023 Fred & Edith Herman Memorial Prize

Page submenu block

wintering in america

Newsletter Sign Up