We accept, some fates are too great to bear: the white birch, black oaks where only crows are hale enough to roost. Red squirrels, too—legion no longer.

We assume blizzards drive life back into its sanctuaries, but at thirty-two inches, snow is bombast, and the county roads collapse into welts of asphalt, clotted drifts. Even the plows won’t come.

We deny the outage of the traffic lights, the musk and slush of the squall, the barometric heaviness of wet boots, stuck cars, the heart-attack neighbor always anchored to his snow shovel.

We watch the frayed reporter, her practiced hand outstretched to the wreckage of industry that once slogged chemicals past the ecotone of wooded plots and unincorporated towns. We lose interest in her.

We forget to hope that jobs will return, that our come-of-age children will ever return to us. They rucksacked their lives to somewhere else. We helped them pack. We forget that, too.

We can’t recall if snow ever melts, if robins return, if moths were ever anything but the color of soot, if bluebells ever really grew between creosote railway ties.

We see the eyesore stalled at a railway terminus, its tank cars weeping into our strange cancers. We get used to that.

We sigh as the Susquehanna sighs, its ice-floes muscling through, like tug and scow, to bilge upward and over the doomed roots of trees, the trusses of eroding embankments, and onto the highway’s shoulders.

We stay calm. We wait, uncomplaining. The flood will gently break upon us, dull, toxic, inconvenient.

We pull it close, our soft, snow-leaden destruction, into the lining of our winter coats, glacial, and cool against our ribs. We take off our glove, surrender a hand into its open mouth.

This is how we should end, even if we endure it, even if we pray not to, even if we pay it no mind at all.

A disabled, queer poet and writer, Karl Sherlock’s recent work appears or is forthcoming in Broken Lens, Cathexis Northwest, Lime Hawk, Mollyhouse, RockPaperPoem, Stone Boat, Science Write Now, Street Light, Third Street Review, Wordgathering, and others, as well as in anthologies such as New Feathers and The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet. He is a Sundress 2014 “Best of the Net” finalist for his memoir about marrying a conversion therapy torture survivor. A professor of writing, he lives and teaches from home in El Cajon, California, where he is also caregiver to his critically ill husband, Max.