Midnight Skating
Winter 2024
tori knows not to ice skate at night but indulges
anyways
if only for the glow on the surface
of moonlight kissing solid dreamscape. tori twists like she’s weightless, and the rest of the world bends to her will when she’s up there somewhere among stars and snowflakes and the sweet silence of the absence
of her thoughts,
the only time they’re quiet.
when she lands, her ankles quiver
gratefully to have stuck the landing.
tori gets swept away in the symphony
of the night wind, the swelling chorus
of trees rustling,
so she barely notices the ice has any cracks.
she’s in the exact middle
of an infinite starry sky
and a contained lake of crystal,
on the verge of bending, dancing, soaring,
and stumbling, fumbling, falling.
when tori falls, she falls hard,
hitting flat, unforgiving, the cold bite,
snapping jaws blotting skin with bruise.
she blots her knuckles, too,
when she punches the ice.
“next time," she swears,
spitting blood, standing up,
"i’ll get it next time.”
every punch in the ice
is another crack in the web.
tori would rather drown
than not try again.
Sofia Jarski works hard as a full-time college student, writer, and daydreamer. Her poetry has been featured in multiple publications across the U.S. and the U.K. She has been crafting a young adult contemporary novel for the last year. She loves to both consume and create stories that condense big themes about love, life, and loss into the nitty-gritty, tangible details. She lives by the beaches of California with her family and cat Bob.