A Mouthful of Storm Published in Wild Roof Journal Issue 14, May 2022 Lyrical Prose/poetry/CNF
I don’t like to be reminded of the wind between us. These gusts may have brushed your cheek when you went to work this morning, may have blown your hair back out of your eyes where it hangs low, waiting for you to flip it back, but now, five states later, they’ve turned seiche, bellowing in from the west in the dark, their bodies bent around mine. I say please carry me, but not forever, and they say please understand that nothing gets made until all old things are destroyed. I stand on the bare Lake Erie bed, where there’s nothing but sand left because all the water has raged to the east toward Buffalo. Things become lost between you and me, and yet we see them forever, these old things that sway in the dark, so full of gone and days. This storm is a breath of past that insists on itself. I turn my body into the wind and lean forward, arms spread wide, ears full of the delicate and thin pages of us we have yet to write. I hope the wind will hold us upright. This is everything I can say with a mouthful of storm.