Cumulonimbus—that might bear tornados
like the one that picked up our trailer, reminiscent
of other monsters we ran from, like
the blood shoved artlessly between my heart and
my grandfather’s, and how the family talks about nature,
but we don’t mean the storm that almost crushed
the horse barn with a toppled oak.
we mean character, disposition, intent,
tendencies we swear to ourselves we didn’t inherit,
like our dark hair and freckles, and something
along the jawline: a sharp jut of trees
that were uprooted and left to die on their sides,
a bruise turning colors, the roiling of the sky
when it spun grey, green, purple, or how
the tornado was a funnel, empty in the middle,
on the inside, where whatever destructive force
my grandfather hid, crouching, like how the cradle
of light on the radar belied a horizon that was clear
until the sky reached down and said, siren-sharp,
this isn’t an impact you’re meant to survive.
But in the morning, we walked out to the oak,
and armed with chainsaws and rebar spines, we
cut it into manageable pieces, and we mourned,
dragging it away, leaving our wounds open to air,
like the suspicious cant of a cloudless sky,
a half-remembered prayer when infection
had already silted the bloodstream, like surviving the
impact but being ill-equipped to climb the crater.
And we bear our genes like we bear the local news,
with held breath and empty centers and assurances
we can still build in the spaces we were torn from.
like the one that picked up our trailer, reminiscent
of other monsters we ran from, like
the blood shoved artlessly between my heart and
my grandfather’s, and how the family talks about nature,
but we don’t mean the storm that almost crushed
the horse barn with a toppled oak.
we mean character, disposition, intent,
tendencies we swear to ourselves we didn’t inherit,
like our dark hair and freckles, and something
along the jawline: a sharp jut of trees
that were uprooted and left to die on their sides,
a bruise turning colors, the roiling of the sky
when it spun grey, green, purple, or how
the tornado was a funnel, empty in the middle,
on the inside, where whatever destructive force
my grandfather hid, crouching, like how the cradle
of light on the radar belied a horizon that was clear
until the sky reached down and said, siren-sharp,
this isn’t an impact you’re meant to survive.
But in the morning, we walked out to the oak,
and armed with chainsaws and rebar spines, we
cut it into manageable pieces, and we mourned,
dragging it away, leaving our wounds open to air,
like the suspicious cant of a cloudless sky,
a half-remembered prayer when infection
had already silted the bloodstream, like surviving the
impact but being ill-equipped to climb the crater.
And we bear our genes like we bear the local news,
with held breath and empty centers and assurances
we can still build in the spaces we were torn from.
Isabel J Wallace is a queer writer and nurse working in Florida. The swamp has left her predisposed towards ghost stories and the certainty that something is always lurking just out of sight. She's been published in Malaise: a Horror Anthology, as well as in Passengers Journal.