Winter Eyes

She has winter eyes. 

Her eyes are hailstorms—

They glow with slate ice 

And freeze with ash.

They are two churning whirlwinds, 

Whipping across unexposed skin, 

They are owl wings, 

Beautiful in their severity. Sylphlike. 

Her eyes are quiet, and still, 

Taking in everything, approaching nothing

As subtle as a polar freeze.

Her eyes are melting glaciers in a simmering sea  

Relentless as quicksilver, harsh, and judging, 

with all the unexpected age of new coins. 

She had seen things, with those winter eyes,

That has whitened her soft shadows and 

Thrown her features into harsh contrast, 

Blindingly sharp, as the sunlight on snow.

Her eyes have been forced

To become as mercurial as a wolf’s, 

As wary as a steel trap, 

rushing shut with the screaming burn of a flash freeze. 

The walls that flash up behind her eyes are made of silver. 

They coat her lids with permafrost, 

And shut away the gray petals that once bloomed within them. 

She has become owl-sharp, knives ready to raze,

Cutting away the downy gray fuzz of 

connection and weakness. 

Inside the fortress of wings and ash-steel, she withers. 

She did not ask to become a survivor, but here she exists, 

Stone-fierce. Protected. Alone. 

But sometimes, 

The permafrost begins to seep away. 

The swords along her eyes sink back into

The dark earth of her pupils, and 

her harshness crumbles, 

Leaving her soft as a finished blizzard, 

Coated gently in the quiet of new snowfall.

At first glance, they were sickle-edged and

Blazing with wolf-fury, icy as betrayal, and hard as love. 

But now, her eyes soften, becoming rabbit-gray and moth-soft. 

Here she exists, her gaze holding 

the impossible depth and duality of a white wildfire. 

Mercurial. Paranoid. Alive. 

The girl 

With winter eyes.