Production Notes for February: The Movie

Production Notes for February: The Movie

1. Snow covers everything like a film.

2. The only theatre in town is showing The Return of the Bride of Quietness.

3. Overhead, a wedge of geese: A greater than sign? Lesser than? A boomerang?

4. The world is as quiet, white, and immobile as a crime scene. Go back to your homes. There is nothing more to see.

5. We are living in an ice pick epoch.

6. You are between stations now, and the radio is all snow -- static, stasis, metastasis.

7. A two-page spread for glow-in-the-dark, faux snow by Hasbro.

8. As far as the eye can see: pine trees, pining.

9. I.V. tubes hanging from the icy branches.

10. Outside the elementary school, a family of snow people.

11. Paper snowflakes in every classroom window. Some are clearly identical.

12. Children dancing in the grooves of the snow plow.

13. The ground is hard and cold, like Belmondo in Breathless.

14. The only diegetic music: the hectic commotion of thick flakes.

15. Snowy mounds: kyphotic, erotic, necrotic.

16. Between the quilts and covers: quivers.

17. Snow covers our footprints before we can make fresh tracks.

18. What made you ever think you could ice skate?

19. Chap stick syllogism: Therefore, all good things must come to an end.

20. Our only aspiration: suspiration

21. Outside the ticket booth, we huddle together for warmth.

22. It’s bitter cold, but at least outside we can still see our breath in front of us.

23. The audience sits, facing the white screen in the early dark, waiting for the lights to come on.

24. The cold bothers you more these days.

25. You find you’ve started to use the word “marrow.”

26. A warm memory of Tweety Bird: I thawed I thaw…

27. The ice begins to give – a tickle, a trickle, a rivulet.

28. The slow dissolve.
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This poem will appear in the next issue of River Oak Review.