After The Tornado

Perhaps like a woman seated at the kitchen table being interviewed just a few steps away from the tree that has recently fallen through the ceiling of her living room, the sound of annihilation is something you never forget, I explain. Even as bathroom walls collapse and parts of the roof blow off into the yard you will continue to experience the thunderous ripping and splitting off of structures that once contained you long after the upheaval has gone.

Maybe while triple-stepping to the cha-cha-cha of your accelerated heartbeat, pain from the shoes you've outgrown will further fuel your inner thrum and pang of personal loss. Feeling as out-of-place as chicken wire hanging from a power line or a bathtub in a tree, your survival speaks the language of a cautious belonging. When the noise of disaster dissipates, the litany of who did what to whom and what went wrong so very long ago abruptly stops.