MOUNTAIN SONG

Within a single breath of time, blink of eye, eye of newt, hook and crook, I find myself on Snowshoe Mountain. I also find, to my surprise, that my feet are completely snowed in. It’s rather hard to move my limbs in carbonite, but I employ the tenacity of a snowplow and make my way through Snowshoe. The trees sparkle like windows and the earth is a mirror of the empyrean, a hop skip and a jump away from the food court. From Whistlepunk to the Green Onion to the Village Center to the Top of the World I trek, watching snowboarders cut open the sky and children turn into angels, Yankees in tee shirts talking down to Dixons enveloped in artificial fur coats, and every Who in every flake falling down in Snowshoe devoured suddenly by thirsty travelers with their tongues to the vanilla ice-cream sky. It’s not the first time my head has been in the clouds.

CHARLES HUNTER JOPLIN is a literature Ph.D. candidate at USM. Hunter’s academic interests primarily encompass late 19th and early 20th century Anglo-Irish literature and culture. He specializes in literary modernism, war poetry, textual criticism, and historical prosody. Hunter’s academic work has been published in Explicator and will be published in a forthcoming edition of War, Literature & the Arts. His poetry will be published in the forthcoming debut of Bay Window Journal and he is thrilled to be a part of Product 31.