Snowman believed in taking one day at a time.
He had just lost an eye.
Which was a 1978 penny.
The snow-woman across the street thought he was winking
and she winked back.
But Snowman missed it because his peripheral vision was now very bad.
On the bright side, everything smells sweet
when your nose is a carrot.
Even when one of your eyes has just slid down your face because a crow
has been pecking at that nose and disturbed your very shallow eye socket.
(Snowman’s remaining eye was a silver dollar
which made him look like he was wearing a monocle.)
The crow eventually gave up and left the nose intact.
Thank goodness for a firmly planted proboscis!
Snowman added In God We Trust to his list of aphorisms.
The snow-woman wore a red Fendi scarf, which the crow coveted.
By noon the crow’s nest was lined with couture.
Snowman felt sad that the snow-woman now
had nothing to keep her neck warm and he rejoiced when the sun came out.
Snowman’s silver-dollar eye stayed put even as his body thinned, pin-holes
forming with each tiny drip-drop falling from the branches above him.
His vision became obscured by floaters shaped like Eisenhower’s head.
He became delirious and dreamed
that the snow-woman had turned into Carmen Miranda.
The fruit on her head grew wings and caused a commotion.
In his last lucid moment Snowman thought
tomorrow I will tell the snow-woman about those
flying papayas. I think she'll get a kick out of that.
©
lives in Seattle, where she is a freelance writer and editor, and the co-editor of the online poetry and art journal DMQ Review. She has a chapbook forthcoming this year from Dancing Girl Press, and a full-length poetry collection due in 2013 from Mayapple Press. Find out more from her website.
We’ve published five more poems by Manwaring: “Driving Across the University Bridge I Think About the Eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg,” “Baton,” “Levitation,” “Where Sadness Lives,” and “Musée Mécanique.”
