COLD DAYS IN FLORIDA
When the temperature drops to forty degrees,
people don’t want to walk around.
It is too cold to be outside.
They stay inside and wait
until the days get warmer.
The temperature rarely drops below forty.
But once it dropped to twenty-eight.
When that happened, birds started to die.
All around the bay, all kinds of birds
keeled over, because of the cold.
Along with the birds, people started to die,
but not everyone succumbed to the cold.
Only old people died;
they couldn’t take the shock.
–Thaddeus Rutkowski
Check out Thaddeus Rutkowski’s new poetry collection, border crossings.
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Poetry