Yvette Flis

Yvette Flis publishes under different names, each hers, but gave up spare vowels when she took up snow drifts and dark winds. Her works have be seen in The Linnets Wings, Rat’s Ass Review and Scarlet Leaf Review, The Atlantic, Blood and Bourbon, under the names Yvette Managan and Yvette Wielhouwer, in The Prose Poetry Project, Winamop, Every Day Fiction, under Yve Wildflower in Nefarious Ballerina. She reads to remember and writes to forget.

Persistence of Winter

If it hadn’t been for the bones
beached and whitened,
stuck in Erie’s still-ice
(from here to Canada)
even today as Matka and I
rode down 5
(where east is south)
(where everything is south),
the end-all limbs
of once great oaks and maples,
the downy flutters from gulls,
robin-song at grey-light
as two males sparred
at the fence line,
squishy mud that splatted
up around edges of my Chuck Taylors,
the rushing of our
neighbor-creek,
five rounding-bellied does
nibble out back, heads turned
toward the opened door
ears twitch, but they stay,
brave in the spring-light,
I’d stop thinking of end-times,
a persistence of winter.