A little girl looks out
Grandma’s picture window
at the frozen puddle-ponds
in neighboring winter fields.

Gets thickly dressed for outside:
snowpants, jacket, hat, mittens, boots, scarf
tied across nose and mouth
only blue eyes exposed.

Heads directly to the ice
stamping it to shards
mud underneath coats her red boots.
Tramps back to the country house

“Let me in, I’m cold” in her small girl voice
“No, you only just got out”
after 30 minutes of getting dressed.
She shuffles down the garage cement steps

with the locked door to the basement
at the bottom, she pokes the dead
crisp beetles and June bugs with a stick
interested in everything

Margaret Dubay Mikus
© 2012

From Thrown Again into the Frazzle Machine