I saw my dead sister sipping coffee early in the morning at Grand Central Station. I was scrambling for the train that would take me to Lexington and 52nd when I saw her leaning on the granite newel of the East Balcony staircase…
There is an earthquake in Japan, and I hold my hands on my belly that seizes with the rumble of patting feet. The news warns of tsunami waves as close as California or Hawaii and as far as Japan.
“Mama, I do not like thunderstorms,” she declared with a whisper. And with wide worried eyes she told me how today, at camp, some kids told her that she could die if she looked at lightning.
We lived in the black-veined mountains, because my father was a coal-mining engineer. Where my father and I saw comfort, my mother saw dilapidated houses, smeared on the sides of hills.
On the other side of the stuccoed cinderblock walls, the unfamiliar howls: a hurricane, the first of four—Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne—that will maul Florida during the summer of 2004.
You know it’s been a bad rain when you see so many dead frogs. I saw a lot of them along the side of the road. The air smells different during a flood.
It is exactly zero degrees, and the sleet is hitting my cheek faster that I can wipe it away.
I never knew quite how my mom would answer the question that I’d pose to her each morning when I’d call at 6:45.
Starla’s poems are difficult and shocking but impressively written. She’s a kid, but it’s clear that she knows things a 14 year old should not know.
When I was growing up my father always tried to keep Venus fly traps… They didn’t look like anything dangerous, but I always got a little nervous knowing that it ate meat..
