Abstract
With the hurricane, we practiced our tongues. Its holler-promise, beat, and blather a backdrop to which, inside, we fashioned our soft pleas. Our prayers, really, belly-down on the shedding rug, to our altar of playing cards. For what to pray, for whom, the knives said. The storm’s whispers clattered damp on the house’s rainwater lacquer. Knives rattled their answer. Warned us to Stay away from the windows. Grandma presided, through the slats of the hurricane shutters, in mais la silence. An exasperation in yellow-lighted limbo against the sky opaqued by untarped belongings. Our make-do treehouse, abandoned out of childhood-charged boredom, now a vortex of 2 × 4s, particleboard, oval-headed nails spicing the backyard pool, the vinyl fence panels flung with peeled shingles like teeth after the hurricane’s dust -dipped uppercut, et cetera. Grandma asks of the storm, the storm asks of Grandma. We’d just finished our game— at what distance will our breath be destructive? —when the knives turned to us. With new, patron saint medal eyes, we lay atop our altar of scattered cards.