February 17, 2025Tornado
The mountains here feel like they’d rather be elsewhere,
so ground down at this point they look like hills.
Hate to call a mountain a hill and erase
the promise of smoothing this view,
this time span, these mumbled
ranges could offer us.
The Appalachian Mountains were once taller than the Himalayans.
Time alone does something, then, yes?
They’re older than Saturn’s rings.
Hate to say time alone
doesn’t do anything.
When all the flowers die, that’s called a season.
In class I say, raise your hand if someone
you know has died from fentanyl,
hate to tell you this, but
a whole room of hands
raised like rubble
rolling back up
a mountain.
My daughter is scared of tornados, and so I tell her
tornados can’t cross the Appalachian Mountains.
I teach her to look out the window
and follow their blue ridge
with her finger when
she’s scared.
You could fill a whole holler with what I didn’t know.
Nothing inside my house had moved one inch
when I quietly opened my front door and
saw my home had landed
somewhere new.
Even that summer, when I was pregnant,
his last summer alive, when birds flew
into my house, I thought myself
protected. Warnings perched
on my mantel, and I
hate to say this,
but I shooed
each one
away.
from #86 – Poetry Prize