“Frostbite” Honorable Mention, Main Street Voices, Doylestown

You tilted back your head to show me

the blanched streaks on your neck pushing against the forest

of your chin

and the wayward white bristles you insist on plucking out.

“There was no gray,” you said, “before I fell.”

I came to find these white spots cover your body,

along the small of your back and across the softness of your lower abdomen

where your clothes had billowed in the frigid water.

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