October’s snow is virgin, the wedding veil of a defiant bride. Tugged fiercely over a rigid face. The insects expire beneath its layer, rot and dirty wings dissipating. All is clean.

July you rest upon grass or hide from the fuzzy bugs darting outside the windows. Aquamarine waters beckon your name. Attempt to leave and the beach scorches your soles. Do not breathe—you will choke on the richness around you, or realistically, inhale a fly.

December knocks on your door, bumping the hung holly, kissing cheeks who spent years apart. The weather might deliver death upon the unfortunate locked outside.

January renewed, frothed with promises, that gleam like truth for those thirty one days. It makes a believer out of a pessimist.

February realizes the promises for naught. The day after your beloved, when the specialty fades, abandoned on the fifteenth. It is tragedy simulacrum, those melted candies in your pocket. Succinct except when the year leaps, because horror must never go on so long.

June clings to the skin and breathes down the nape, heat incarnate. A little longer now and it will brand you in freedom, drink the rest of the cold from your veins like lemonade. Hold the ice.

March is the first proceedings in the divorce of snow and grass, within in a court, judged by the strokes of sunlight that creep out from their judicial gown of clouds. The judgement is merciless. Snow will not survive.

April will never watch your back. It exhausts the energy as daylight withers a vampire. The veins do not want to work, please do not force them. We are in the final stretch, so close yet so far. Most is learnt here.

November, and the air dares to snow, to break the fragility of its predecessors, but not too much. Modesty maintains, it maintains, and drapes upon itself a hefty coat of white, weighing the trees in pearly boas.

May sludges on. Green overpowers the white cast, finally, and flies crack from their cages, tumbling out of the ice, gasping for the first strokes of sunlight. The tires will need replacing.

August grasps at the strings of remembrance. A beggar on the street, the shaking cup soundless from no contents. How to fill it with attention? Impossible. Its siblings shine much brighter.

September, time to pick the backpacks and renovate the wardrobe, as the tidings of the future ripple forth. Do not let it pass you by, nor the time before or after. Every breath matters.