When it’s sleeting, I think right away of the places where it’s likely sleeting worse. You can bet it’s sleeting heavily in Yellowknife, Murmansk, Tromsø, Minneapolis, or Wroclaw. These are probably the sleet capitals of the world where the bleary, inconclusive gray of rain-ice make the buildings across the street seem a thousand miles away, sleet pricking the petrified windows all day like a tattoo artist with blue hands. Old ladies slip on the ice. Dogs lick their frozen paws. People shuffle through the sleet, their heads bowed. The cities try to plow the sleet, but it’s no use. The blades grind the pavement to salt, the scraping sound rattling the houses with the roar of a damaged plane searching for a place to land. Yet the sleet keeps coming down. It produces a trance-like state in the mail carriers, in the pastry chefs and tailors sitting alone with a CLOSED sign hanging by a nail on the front door. They’re imagining the sleetless locales of Vientiane, Cabo Verde, Wollongong, and Bahia Honda, and recalling the time they saw angels come back from the dead, when they left flowers at the statues of headless saints.

Richard Hedderman’s poetry has been published in dozens of journals and anthologies both in the U.S. and abroad. He’s served as a guest poet at the Library of Congress, and Writer-in-Residence at the Milwaukee Public Museum. His most recent book of poems is Choosing a Stone.