Crushed sage pungent in the sharp air springs up worry through our snowshoe tracks 

Dana hold with one foot in Xtratuf sinking deep with each step, her fallen off snowshoe in hand

We know we've arrived because a cloud of steam covers the dark road, boiling up from the culvert of thermal springs

Headlights throw sharp relief, conifer silhouettes against the white mountainside on the other side of the river. We lean back in the heat of the wooden tub, stare up at nothing. If you close your eyes, you can imagine you're floating down the river 

 I would lay here all day

But there's bread I'm baking

Thank god it needs me

 I turn my pain

Into a knife that I hold at my

Own back.

If I can't feel better,  I can

Become better, at least

Feet on pavement grinding up

The big hill four, seven, ten times

Drizzle rain

And I barely even feel

Heart rate 170

Emptiness is my new

Superpower

There is a rare intimacy about the gym in the condo. You see strangers in a space so familiar it is called home.

In various states of dress, all these people who might never lounge this way at a paid-for gym appear, paunches relaxed over swim trunks, texting from the hot tub.

I recognize the teenage girl who walks straight to the bike, earbuds in, five intense minutes and then done. I see this man who fights the drooping elastic in his skin by lifting free weights every day.

I'm the barefoot one, hair barely back as it slithers from last night's braid, on the free-motion running machine. I'm a regular; they know me. We on the eighth floor run from behind our glass-walled balcony and watch the pool scene below.