A Poem

Tornado in Iowa

You lost yourself gradually, folding into her bonnie blue eyes

You’d never seen Gone with the Wind to know the final result.

She first stole your arms,

So we could no longer hug you—we could only speak—and stare

With your arms now windmills, turning the breeze, we censored our voices around you, watched our words change

You sucked them away into your torrent of wind, manipulating

After this, she came for your voice, we could no longer hear you speak, but you were there, the wind swirled faster, licking up the dust from our childhood, our past.

I tried to call it out to you—“Don’t you see, that doll you gave me?” It blew up into the wind, shredding it into the tunnel, and it was scattered

Existence, of course—it is not always temporary, I knew the doll existed in my universe, even if it was now of the past, an alternate time capsule. I remembered who gave it to me.

You were gone, though, your eyes had melted into hers, you were her all consuming blue beast , we could not even come to you—to visit.

And you were so very hungry, whirling yourself into a panic, unsolvable and inexplicable problems popped up out of nowhere, things we did not do, Doppler warnings we did not ask for, weather beacons we lost the key to read

Later, the rest of us planted ourselves into the ground, we would become perennials. Our ribosomes were untouchable, storing so much energy that our return was inevitable.

We planted ourselves in the dirt, in the fertile soil, turned our leaves up to the sun and waited for the tornado to return.