Kris Raido

ORIGAMI IN WHITE


In a new season of letters
I spend my days in an origami frame,
my body reduced
to paper's knife-edge folds.

The air no longer cuts, but chills
with soft wet fog and lightly-breathing mists.
It's winter, and as winter makes
its will, it will remember us

and write in one last clause
of snow and gluey ice. I know
that spring has turned in sleep
and dreamed of rising

by the sharp and blackened beaks of birds
who start to watch with wary eyes,
tip up their armored feathers,
croon longingly of nests.

I am made of paper, thin and dry,
crackling in winter's desiccate hands.
If a puppet dreamed of flesh,
then I have dreamed

of being calm, unfolding
every weathered crease, until my eyes
lose all their hollow tension
and drop the bruised and darkened lids.

Kris Raido is an Experimental Psychology graduate student in the Pacific Northwest