Karen Lea Armstrong is a writer and former family physician from Timmins, Ontario. Her fiction, poetry and nonfiction have appeared in Ars Medica, The Antigonish Review, Synkroniciti and Grain. Her debut novel, Drownproofing, was published in 2023.
Website · Drownproofing at FriesenPress
Snowstorm
From Born of Boreal Bones – A Northern Poetry Anthology.
Read the poem as text
A silhouette
within the swirl of snow
outside
the high-end grocery store downtown.
No sign, no words
just shivering,
white layering his coat
Submission.
I give a twenty, tell him
get some food.
Watch the snowstorm swallow him,
fill my van with seven-dollar strawberries,
lush winter watermelon,
marinated steaks
Twenty bucks. Many things I could have given:
mittens, hope, warmth, a smile
a single,
perfect
glistening berry
But I did not.
© Karen Lea Armstrong
© Karen Lea Armstrong · Born of Boreal Bones