Notes on a Tornado as it Devastates a Trailer Park
(after Adrian Matejka’s Beat Bop)
Some Texas boy sees a twister
chopping the stand of dogwood where
fields of aluminum whistle in wind and all
men have two big fists for digging
hellward–
which leads to the boy cupping
hands and leaning on a bus window–
a mattock of air carving
toward the trailer park
where his mom lives and will
resume writing in that secret diary
with no mention of meter, until–
she jambs it under the waterbed and
listens for the whistling
and a radio wasting
breath on old George Jones.
This precursor– a toaster oven warming
to He Stopped Loving Her Today–
she imagines a plain poem on it,
unsacks the groceries,
slides toward missing the boy’s
two fisted dad and the smell of diesel
and salt
and the way he sang:
kept some letters by his bed
dated nineteen sixty-two
he had underlined in red
and other songs that will never stir the boy
who watches wind’s wide blade
and plumbs his memory for signs of death.
The bus window is a mirror too–
he works a fist through his hair,
the bus driver yelling everybody
hold on, the boy
is so young, he has only
just begun
to dig.
John Leo’s writing has appeared in Tinderbox, Breakwater Review, and the bathroom stalls of several Indianapolis dive bars. He is a teacher and activist with an MFA from Butler University. Catch him on twitter @_johnleo.
