A Cold Spring by Will Cordeiro

Sunrays riddled the snow-mounds, heartless as any gangster. Noon had detonated each vacant crystal. Old sneakers dangled from a tree, their shadows twisted. The river, swollen, dragged off the last dead branches. On its surface a few small clouds (dimpled on its mirror) raced toward the mountains, but the current fled where it always goes: elsewhere. And neither lover ever sent their long, their longing letters.

Will Cordeiro received his MFA and Ph.D. from Cornell University. His work appears or is forthcoming in BOAAT, Copper Nickel, Cortland Review, Crab Orchard Review, CutBank Online, DIAGRAM, Drunken Boat, Fourteen Hills, Harpur Palate, New Madrid, Phoebe, Sentence, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere (but not, as of yet, in elsewhere). He is grateful for a scholarship from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a Truman Capote Writer’s Fellowship as well as residencies from ART 342, Blue Mountain Center, OraLerman Trust, Risley AIR at Cornell University, and Petrified Forest National Park. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he is a faculty Member in the Honors Program at Northern Arizona University.