Amid a confluence of rivers

A row of mobile homes

A little bit aways

The news was unconvincing.

The weather was uncooperative.

Day 19: The twister decapitated a deer.

—

“It was known that the mountain was coming,

but nobody did anything because we don't

pay attention to rumors” he said.

They’d never seen anything like it.

They’d never heard anything like it.

They wouldn’t live through it,

so they never spoke of it.

—

It was like this: “Woo, woo, woo, woo. Boom.”

She lifted the quilt from her head

to find herself surrounded by trees

instead of toilet paper rolls.

She rode out the tornado in her bathtub.

She rode through the tornado in her bathtub.

She was seventy-five and unharmed, if horrified.

She was seventy-five and in the forest, floored.

—

It was over before it began.

The children went to sleep and woke up dead.

“People were yelling the names,” she said.

“Others were screaming at God.”

She found the boy clinging to a washing machine, filthy.

He said his parents were still in their home.

“But where he pointed to, there was nothing.”

—

It was a reverse downtrend,

the world’s second-largest reinsurer noted,

in its annual natural catastrophe review.

“There could be a silver lining to the disaster,” he said.

And so, they reviewed the protocol for silver linings.

Silver linings: wild fruit, water lilies,

the kindness of neighbors.

The first two edible, the latter reliable.

All were running low.

—

The earth split, shook.

The earth shook, split.

The split shook, earth.

The news was unreliable.

The weather was unpredictable.

So, did she have any hope?

It could be good for

the article’s end.

She did,

but now,

but now,

but now,

“but now I don’t know.”

That would do.

—

Day 8: A faint call, then a flurry of drilling.

The boy would not come up. He was scared.

They pulled him back

on top of the earth,

instead of inside it,

he smiled.

“I smiled because I was free,” he said to reporters.

“I smiled because I was alive,” he said to cameras.

His parents report that he is now silent, withdrawn.

He seems to be elsewhere.

—

Buried alive,

she died

scratching

her way out.

The girl’s mother said she had no more nails,

which is exactly what a mother would notice,

if the mother herself survived.

—

The heat came, the rain didn’t,

the roads melted, the dead died.

“Even my mobile phone gave up and stopped working” he said.

(The phone was revived with a wet cloth and 20 to 25 minutes of time.)

He was an eyewitness,

he wanted to take pictures.

—

It was coming like a wave, a wall.

It moved imperceptibly towards them.

It was roaring, silent, still.

She didn’t know whether

to look or look away,

so she closed one eye.

The news was unrelenting.

The weather was unstoppable.

It became real, but still,

it seemed only a dream.

They went to sleep and woke up dead.

—

Day 4: the man emerged from a slit,

draped in a floral blanket.

—

The papers could not agree

whether it was natural or

un-

“Naturally, they are angry,” the official said.

The people who lived

lived, but that night

they did not sleep.

Day 2: The sun rose and

they crowded onto a lookout point,

way above, to see what they had lost.

“It was too much.”

—

They called it luck,

but it was only life,

and they the living, dying proof.

—

Officials deemed it a wake up call.

The parents called their names,

and the papers called for concrete things.

They hired Chief Resilience Officers,

considered scale and scope.

No one could say they did nothing,

but nothing they did did anything.

The shushing, rushing waters came.

The shushing, rushing mothers went.

The news was weather.

The weather was news.

—

“Ultimately, we give up and we leave here,” he said.

“That’s how the story ends.”

Another he waved his hand, as if to erase the damage,

said, “Life will continue here.”

They lived thousands of miles apart.

They knew not of each other.

Day 1: Survivors were miraculous and few.