Unexpected by K.C. Morton Carpenter

First Place, Adult Poetry

The forsythias bloomed this week without permission
or notice of any kind. They don’t usually wait for my attention,
nor send reminders, but I would have liked one. 

Last week, a foot of snow fell – a giant, heavy blanket, shutting down power

to half the state – conspiring with spring mud and king tides,
destroying the crocuses and snowdrops midbloom.

“It’s all confused!” I say, and you giggle, your lengthening shins
stride across the kitchen, having long run out of pj pants to cover them. I shiver.
I try to remind you: “A sweater is something you wear

when your mother is cold.” Your sparkling laugh tumbles over 

the breakfast dishes, like the snowmelt trickling off the roof through sunrays
and bud tipped twigs outside the dew-skinned window.

And I hug you tightly, my child. I tell you “I’m stealing your heat,” 

my little furnace, an ember I wanted so much that I wrote you
into being when I was barely twenty, thirty years ago. 

Later we will dig our hands into the mud, cleaning out the raised bed
for the spring. I will plunge my fingers in deep, hoping – with every
straining carpal muscle – to slow the earth a little.