pamphlet_292599_HIV_signs_and_symptoms.pdf

This kind of snow—that falls in the quiet
morning after all the traffic’s gotten

to where it needs to go and all the streets
are empty so this snow makes it almost

more quiet, more empty, like all the flakes
falling in the middle distance only

show the stillness everywhere behind;
nothing but scraps of white fluttering down

so that they look like the kind of ripped up
paper from when I was a kid writing secrets

down and worried they’d be found so I’d tear
them up into ragged pieces so small

no one’d ever fit them together—
is piling so much it can’t be ignored.

Noah Stetzer is the author of Because I Can See Needing a Knife (Red Bird Chapbooks). His poems have appeared in Sixth Finch, The Cortland Review, The Night Heron Barks, and other journals. Noah can be found online at www.noahstetzer.com.