Last night there was a frost

For Chris

so hard it looked like snow and crackled
beneath my boots as I crossed the lake  
remembering the winter after graduation
the winter of bad boyfriends and first
grown-up jobs when we shared that hot
apartment on Lake Mendota where the rent 
was cheap because it was over the incinerator 
and how the lake froze before it snowed
and how on moonlit nights we’d strip sheets 
from our beds meet friends at the shore
and lacing up our skates take positions
on each side of a sheet holding it taut
until the wind blew up billowing the sheets 
sending us racing across the lake a white 
blue striped stained torn regatta as shifting
ice boomed in the clear cold air and we hoped
the long jagged cracks in the ice would not
split open because all we wanted was this
freedom, this flying through the night.

Gillian Nevers, Madison, is a Pushcart nominee and prize-winning poet whose work has appeared in several print and online literary magazines and anthologies. Her illustrated chapbook, The True Story, published by Fuller’s Windy Acres Farm Press, won second prize in The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ 2019 chapbook contest.