Someone or Another by M.J. Iuppa

Staring into night’s still air, snow’s 

newest disorder drifts among a puzzle 

of trees that line the path to the lake.

Our walk becomes slow & sure-

footed—steps taken to skirt chit

chat’s sudden pitfall where

we’re left— suspended—

our breath hanging 

in the cold.

M.J. Iuppa lives on a small farm near the shores of Lake Ontario. She is Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Minor at St. John Fisher College. Her lyric essays have appeared in In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal, edited by Mary Paumier Jones and Judith Kitchen (Norton, 1999), Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen (Norton, 2005) and Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, edited by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney (Norton, 2015), and her recently released third full length poetry collection Small Worlds Floating, Cherry Grove Collections, August 2016.