Ice

Ice

by Alexis Marie

They both had forgotten the cold empty splendor 
of the Snow Queen, as though it had been a dream.

              Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen

He peered into the seasons of her world

to see snow melted against

a spring,

crimson blooms reflected

in the icescapes of her terrains.

How long it took her

to scour polar tarns

to shatter glass.

He waited for ablation,

for the white echoes

until she plucked the shard from his eye.

* * *

Alexis Marie lives and writes in Vancouver, Canada. She received her Master’s in Creative Writing from Oxford University. As a child, Alexis dreamed of running away with the circus and she is now an aerialist and acrobat-in-training. She finds inspiration in exploring the endless limits of the physical body, and is a sucker for poetry that provokes nostalgia and memory. Her work has appeared in New Voices, The Oxonian Review, Pandora’s Collective, and Vallum Magazine. Two of her poems were published in Asia Literary Review in July 2013.