Over the phone my older sister prepares for a hurricane,
my younger sisters for wildfire, and I for wind—stretched
like the Vitruvian Man between them, myself a weathervane
and soft center. When they move, I spin.
She carries perishables upstairs. She tracks the news.
She (as in me) plugs the drafty door with napkins and masking tape
when the power’s gone out. When? How Close? I’ll call tomorrow.
We’ve each visited the other across country at some point,
so by now we share an eye to picture each of ourselves
in her rooms or at her desk or standing by the window
watching the clouds roll in. We exchange small fates
like tokens of pressed-flowers and what may come.
She tells me, The house wasn’t flooded. She tells me, The fire
is a town over though the sky looks bad. She tells,
All day, you’ll listen to chainsaws breaking apart the fallen trees.
Alone I feel two kinds of missing. The rings of opened trunks
draw me into early springs and dry seasons held so tightly
they might catch fire. And weeks after, what remains—
crushed fences and bent chain-link gates all around the city,
as if when they fell, something monstrous broke through.
Jacqueline Balderrama is the author of Now in Color (Perugia Press, 2020) and chapbook Nectar and Small (Finishing Line Press, 2019). She’s a Virginia G. Piper Fellow at Arizona State University. We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Sister Storms.
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