February

After Margaret Atwood

February, month of despair,

thank God for your relative brevity,

for an end to your twenty-eight

or twenty-nine bleak days of sub-zero

temperatures and minus-twenty windchills,

your blizzards, ice storms, snow dumps,

white-outs, mornings shoveling driveways,

melting ice from windshields and door handles

with jugs of warm water, pulling on layer

after layer of clothing before each excursion

outside the home or office, your short,

grey, frigid, miserable bastard days

lined with blackening piles of plowed

snow and torso-dissecting winds.

Fuck off February, and don’t bother

coming back for another year.