Think of it as mood lighting. Even alpha Apollo
needs a rest. Even if you merry Christmas
with the best of them, strip a Christian and out pops
a naked pagan, pious in their own way, loins warming
by the fire. We are not equatorial, so follow
 
me as spring follows winter, slow yet relentless,
inevitable as death. The best holidays are clustered 
where we need them, around the darkest times
of year when ritual promises renewal. Cuffing
season, the kids call it.
 
Fanning out to frame them, the glowing wreath
of minor constellations: Gothic Halloween,
shadowy Groundhog Day, and commercial cousin:
red-teddied, Valentine, shaking (martyred)
moneymaker; fractals equidistant between solstice
and equinox.
 
You say: summer bodies are forged in winter.
I say: we need energy to hibernate. Have more stuffing
and another piece of pie; let that blood drain brain to gut.
In six months time, that Great Lake ─arctic,
berged with ice─will keep us cool,
while the rest of the city swelters.

—Julie Benesh

In the almost spring
as the white sky
tries to rain
 
Lana is afraid
of that empty Shell station
by the old highway exit,
like the cemetery at the end
of our block                 its spirits,
yet fears no living exoskeleton,
ushering pests to safe new homes:
compassionate cockroach concierge,
 
whereas I murder by proxy with shrink-
wrapped, pre-shelled lobster meat
to throw on a charcoal grill
and consume in an act
of transubstantiation.
 
She does not yet know that Earth
is a graveyard.
 
It's all recycling, for better or worse:
the wages of life are shells;
the first currency, shells
hide, protect, outlast
their host. Fossils
make the world
go around; fossils
fossils, the whole
way down.
 
That electric car billionaire plans 
to abandon this space station:
Are we running out or moving on?
 
Lana believes in reincarnation; together
we ponder the immortal past: ghosts
of men in uniform, names squiggle-stitched
above their pockets, wiping windshields clean.

—Julie Benesh