First Snow

by Susan Michele Coronel (New York, NY)

It’s mid-January, nearly a month after Hanukkah 

ends, when I notice the first appearance 

of white flakes in 700 days. I celebrate 

the return of predictable winter joy, when ice 

slicks sidewalks, & fluffy blankets shroud 

windshields, press their weight into branches. 

I scrape my van after a spot of freezing rain, 

loosen snow & ice from door handles 

before temperatures plunge into the teens. 

On Facebook, I skim photos of my daughter’s 

campus, where kids haul cardboard rectangles 

up scenic slopes, clock tower behind, dots 

of city lights below. It’s the same campus where 

a professor said he found the Hamas attack 

in Israel “energizing” and “exhilarating.”

A British friend reports snow’s arrival with

photos on WhatsApp, streetlamps casting

a ghostly glow over parked cars & hedges.

He says he just checked on his sister,

who has poor balance due to cerebral palsy.

On my side of the world, darkness advances.

Trump wins the Iowa caucus without a sneeze.

The night before, I watch a documentary about

a 93-year-old Holocaust survivor visiting

Warsaw with her adult son. She recalls how

Jewish policemen beat ghetto Jews with clubs

to get them onto trains—if successful, they’d

spare their own lives. They wore the same

boots as Nazis, crisp black against the snow.

Outside my window, flake by flake, snow

tapers & stops. A few neighbors continue to

shovel or salt walkways. Maybe a few–

like me–look outside & gape in wonder

at a lavender sky that sheds white sparkles

over our ordinary lives. We are like candles, 

gazing through curtains at the ever present dark.

Susan Michele Coronel lives in New York City. She has received two Pushcart nominations and won the 2023 Massachusetts Poetry Festival First Poem Contest.  Her poems have appeared in publications including Spillway 29, Plainsongs, Redivider, and Fourteen Hills. In 2021 her full-length manuscript was a finalist for Harbor Editions’ Laureate Prize, and in 2023 another version of the manuscript was longlisted for the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award.