The Tornado

Searcy, Arkansas Spring/02

When the train quit roaring on her roof,
and suction under the door stopped squealing
like a hog on its way to slaughter,
when the ground finished its shudder
and tree branches quit splitting
and falling like brown lightning,

she let go of the toilet she’d been clutching
like the holy grail and put her trembling arms
in a jacket as if her body belonged to someone else.
She was still riding the green rage of that funnel cloud,
lifting roofs and barns, sending bent metal through trees
like needles through fruit.

Beneath a sky washed in milk lightning,
she made her way past mangled car fenders,
the chickens’ red outrage, flattened plants,
steeling herself to find her two prize steers
crushed in the rubble, or stolen from their stalls,
the same steers who’d just a week before

gored a boy who forgot to latch the stall door.
She found the barn gone, erased by wind,
and her coffee stained steers standing
as if still in their stalls though only
the open meadow penned them in.
The Ladies followed her over the rise

still clucking a lecture, beaks mad and ready
as a rooster’s spurs for her delicate flesh
while the steers stood quiet as stones,
all their masculine muscle and blood
tapered like a candle down their ribbed sides,
the genders reversed. My God, she thought,
what storm has happened here?

Near the pond in the bush, seven goose eggs
lay untouched in their nest and her geraniums
stretched their perfect blooms, but she wore her bones
outside her flesh when she walked into her house,
called the tree butchers to come clean up the limbs,
made a whiskey sour, sat and released the wind
from between her ribs. Her neighbors could hear her howling.

*Melissa Gurley Bancks is co-director of the Howard Nemerov Writing Scholars at Washington University. Most recent works are published in: Natural Bridge, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boulevard, A Teacher’s Voice, Sou’wester, The Big Muddy: Journal of the Mississippi, The U. S. Latino Review, The Cape Rock, and the anthologies Key West: A Collection, Microfiction 2: Fictions of the New Millennium, and Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. Awards include 1st place winner in Prentice Hall’s Fiction Contest run by Hayden’s Ferry Review for students, Honorable Mention in the 2005 Boulevard’s Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers, the 1st place James H. Nash Award (St. Louis Poetry Center) for a single poem, and her chapbook, On the Shoulders of Sparrows, was awarded second place by the National Society of Arts and Letters St. Louis Chapter Contest.