I think the month gets cast in a bad light. Winter lingers on, the holiday season is essentially over. We’re all back to work, solidly into a new year, finding ourselves in rhythms again, whether we like it or not.

At this time of year, Racine is somewhere between the bitterest cold and hints of spring, depending on the day. The lake looks moody as ever. Trees are bare, the sky often grey. Snow lingers, riding a seesaw of accumulation and thaw. It’s easy to feel the barrenness of winter will never leave town, but then there are still kids playing at recess and folks walking their dogs along the lakefront.

It’s a month that finds itself in the in between, which is something we all can surely relate to.

And that’s what I like so much about this month. I often say it’s my favorite month.

So in response, I’m tasking myself with writing a poem simply titled “February” over the course of the coming weeks. My aim is to take in the places I find myself, the food I’m eating and drinks I’m drinking, paying attention to how my days feel, and what makes those days uniquely February days. To take stock of the in between feelings, the “in transition” moments, the frustration and hope that I think February holds so uniquely.

Here are a few poems titled February that capture the essence of the month, beyond the specifics, but in entirely different ways. I imagine I’ll be coming back to these for help along the way.

February, by Jill Osier

Sometimes a flag quietly appears
and leads one to a camp in the snow.

Oh, I am sick. I fade, I fall,
I curse this month, all it wants

to be. Its lot is the same
each time, unthawed.

Yet it taunts.
Dreamer month!

Another is just as warm,
as firm, as close to sweat and sigh

as I was, and this month
knows it. This month

sits close-lipped
and wise before the fire.

February, by Margaret Atwood

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

February, by Tamiko Beyer

I’m climbing out of this season, fingernails ragged, belly soft. I tuck a stem of dried mint behind my ear to remind myself.

Once, I bared my shoulders. The bottom of my feet roughed up the dirt with their hard calluses. When I harvested arugula, it smelled of green spice—alchemical veins pulsing sun and dirt and water. I do remember this. I pinned summer light up in my hair and made no apologies for the space I took up—barely clothed and sun-bound.

Now, a ball of twine in the grey sky. The sun rolls low on the horizon. Hangs. Then dips back down again, wind howling us into night.

Inside the erratic rhythm of this wavering flame, I conjure the potent sky of the longest day. Seeds with a whole galaxy inside them. Cicadas vibrating in the alders.

But the sensation of joy slips too quickly into simulacra. Song on repeat. I never meant to find myself in such a cold place, my hair thinning against winter.

Once, red clover grew thick where today’s rabbit tracks pattern the snow. Clover said flow, clover said nourish, clover said we’ve got this.

I reel the memory out, let it linger on the horizon, then reel it back in. I play it out and reel it back in. Some kind of fishing, some kind of flying—again and again. I loosen the buckles of my mind. I take up space in the precision of my breath. I call us all back in.

I think reading poems is as good a teacher as any when it comes to making our own progress. Please join me in writing a February poem, as we welcome this new month.

And if you do, or find yourself writing any sort of place-based poem, send it my way!

Best,
L.A. Sklba
sklblauren@gmail.com