Life in the Snow Brianna Bullen

Life in the Snow

Brianna Bullen

She collects landmarks on her desk.

Novelty turned stagnant. Big Ben in a bauble, Trolltunga

in a dome: seventy snow-globes—Christmas collected. Student loan spending’s

organised in geographically aligned lines. Her last lover gave her the Great Wall as a parting gift, leaving with his

sense of humour. Her mother, Notre Dame Cathedral. A peace offering. She needs to call the woman, but the phone

is always engaged when she tries to bridge

their distance,

already wider than the Pacific. Skype sessions stilt their short words. The Yarra River loops around her Melbourne; she looks into the CBD, cut-off behind her window, and disdain for its industrial influences. Ophelia—fragmented as Picasso—grows

aslant the brook rooted in Southbank. Why? She does not know. She has no control

over town planning. Notre Dame weighs in her palm. A café corner, hot chocolate spilling Euros, and an old man

choking My Way out of an accordion in a kitsch postcard soundscape. Warm feelings kindle the moment, seen

through memory’s frame—as she looks past its glass to her own. She once thought there was a crack in the

window’s corner. Just a spider-web stain. Placing the bauble down, she idles away her day.

Every minute, a flake falls down within the light of her snow-globe

never seeming to accumulate any