Twister Tri-State
Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri: November ‘05
Wind, just
wind. Simple
as the possibility
of death. We slouched away
as taught: crouching over bone-
blue carpet, child hands
prayer-laced over
our necks—peach-soft
part of us, still silk
from birth; our fingers
still new cartilage. Our mothers
far from us. Jesus
wept, & all the little children
in the school hall as teachers
rearranged our hands’ formations.
Around us, heaven
a tight muscle: popping
like mamaws’ knees.
None of us knew, no one knew
then, we had been born
too near the end of days.
All that ageless sky gone smart
as a crow, incandescent
with long memory:
done watching
the generations
throw different shapes
of stone & smoke,
hard smother, for centuries.
In this, so close
to coal country,
old powerhouse heart
of a nation brazen
with waste—that sky
would look at us
& know
what we had came from,
what our hands had taken
& other hands would take—
& revenge
the reap, the ripping.
The delta’s torment
hardly a season
from our backs,
we could trace exactly
what we’d been spared—
how nimbly water
amplifies, beats wind
rabid. & we could see
the barbed fate arcing
towards us, what horizon
held, opaquely,
for those like us—
we, mostly, just the poor,
the poor’s children,
once & future
laborers, quick-forgotten,
a little world
of little messengers
poised to be
left lead-chested.