february’s end

i do not want to sink
    my fingernails into your back

or my toenails into the floorboard
    of your maple-kissed apartment –

but it has been weeks now of
    forgetting my own bed,

listening to your neighbor’s music
    through a thin gypsum nest,

carving our names into ice,
    seeing if it will shatter,

and still i find myself unable to
    face this cold without you.

i recognize in you a similar
    nervousness, timidity –

but a reluctantly forward houseguest,
    i do mean to impose:

please keep your closet’s last clothes hanger threadbare for me.
    please let me stay past the winter.

Madeline Langan is an artist, writer, and architecture student pursuing her Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute with a minor in Literature and Writing. Her work has appeared in The Prattler, Scud, and Ursus Americanus Press's Landfill. She can also be found modeling tiny houses, rereading Wuthering Heights, and watering her plants.