Mother
mixes meatloaf in the kitchen.
Her hands are red with beef.
Father and I stand bare feet on yellow linoleum
watching the storm break through a rattling screen door.
Cyclops
drops splatter concrete
sidewalk tumbles over catalpa’s worming roots.
We remark as rain turns to hail and charges
the tin roof of an open, telephone-pole barn.
Mother
crunches Keebler’s crackers
with sticky palms, you two should step
away from the door, she says
and off flies the Weber lid.
Even
the maple shivers.
Father and I stand gawking
while mother glazes
the loaf with Heinz.
Just
as she bends, opening
the burgundy oven door—
kittens quiet in mid-mew.
Cattle do not swish tails.
The sovereign catalpa splits in two.
Long
after father cleared the gravel road—
I sat
on the cool linoleum, waiting for another sign.
Susan Yount is a born Hoosier trapped in
Chicago. Susan is pursing her MFA in
poetry at Columbia College, works fulltime at the Associated Press, and edits
and publishes the Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal.
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