2nd Place Winner of the Winter Poetry Contest: Thaw - Julia Armstrong

We go to the river. You and the dog 

pick me up on the way. 82 degree heat, 

the trees only just greening. This is spring 

in the mountains—it snowed a weekend ago, 

and now we roast in the light. We drive 

until we find an empty spot between the trees, 

littered with crushed beer cans and brown 

bottle shards. An abandoned frying pan sits cold 

over coals, still smelling of woodsmoke, thick 

and delicious. The dog speeds past us 

into the shallows. We follow, silt stirring 

in clouds around our ankles, the chilled river 

a shock of wet. Above the waist, we burn. 

The air glows, throws gashes of light 

from the surface. Water bugs crowd close, 

and you toss a dead crayfish out of our path. 

The dog races after, gets his jaws around 

the small dark thing. You don’t chide him 

for instinct. I watch flecks of mica swirl 

with every step we take, wash ashore in waves 

of glitter. My hair haloes out of its claw clip, 

reaching for the opposite bank. Submerged 

up to his neck, the dog trembles for the sticks 

we fling. You remembered your sunscreen, 

but I cup the round of my shoulder like a baseball, 

pressing hard until white blooms in the red. 

We spread our towels on the dirt, watch 

the water shimmer into miles of fiber optics. 

The distant moan of a train crystalizes 

into something I want to fit my mouth 

around. Later, after you drop me off at home, 

I will shower and put on a jelly mask, my face 

tight and tender. I will order takeout. 

I will think about how neither of us 

could bring ourselves to go all the way under, 

how, tomorrow, according to the weather, 

it will once again be winter.

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Julia Armstrong graduated from Washington College in 2015 with a BA in English and creative writing. From then until 2020, she worked for her alma mater as the administrative assistant for the Rose O’Neill Literary House. In 2017, she was awarded an Individual Artist Grant in poetry from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her work has appeared in RHINO, Gulf Stream, Nashville Review, Tampa Review, Epiphany Magazine, and the Broadkill Review. Julia received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech in 2023.