Snowball Fight
Michael Meyerhofer

Strange how so much comes back
to that ungraded winter between traumas,
cornfields lifting snowmen like headstones,
so much sky-scorned tap water heaped
against the barn a fortress felt mandatory:

mounds toughened with battlements
like we’d seen in cartoons, even an escape
tunnel carved out one mitten at a time
by myself and a boy whose face I’ve lost
though sweet Christ how we labored

in the sweating cold to brace for battle
against my brother, whose coming we felt
surely as twilight pulls the stitches out,
stockpiling an armory of icicles
plucked right off the barn’s swollen lips

then arrayed beside glinting heaps
of snowballs we knuckled like prayer
though once it started, we could
only flail like saplings in snowpants
and knew gut-deep we were beaten until

my brother simply walked away, so far
from discovering cancer and cheap beer
that he had no trouble shrugging off
our final charge, icicles in hand,
clear blades breaking against his back.

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Michael Meyerhofer’s Comments

Since losing my brother a few years ago to a long and difficult illness, I often find myself thinking less of his final days in that hospital and more about seemingly casual, random moments we spent together as kids―all that possibility, all that time I didn’t know enough to savor, kindness my brother showed that’ll I’ll never again have the chance to repay.

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