Signs of Perimenopause

long bands of snow scrunchies wrap

thinning ribbons of road this morning

driving to where I misremembered we were

supposed to meet at 5am to run

in 5 degrees, my whole face scuffed

with cold

later I forget the quizzes and rush back

to my office for them, salting my heels

on grimy ground clouds between buildings

my own students tell me it’s martial not marshal

as I am writing on the board I become

thermally unstable, red rectangle

glasses fogging up

framing everything through rectangles converges

our thinking, I've known this

since grad school,  when I told you

I’d be there and I wasn’t,  I surprised even myself,

I can only keep so many things at eye level

where I can track them

tonight our bodies quiver like eggs dropped in a bed

of boiling water, shell-less and briefly see-through

before obfuscating to white  but when I wake

in a quilt of palms, it's only my own sweat slowly

denaturing  me

Abigail Michelini (she/her) is a Pushcart-prize nominee whose work can be found in SWWIM, The Main Street Rag, and Thimble Literary Magazine, among other publications. Her scholarly work has been published in The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics and Writing Center Journal. She is the author of the chapbook, Brace (Thirty West Publishing House, 2025) and teaches writing at Northampton Community College. When she's not writing, you can find her running Pennsylvania back roads. Find her at www.abigailmichelini.com and on Instagram @abigailmichelini